Welcome to Sports with Nick
If you're a Boston sports fan, or like random sports research projects, then this site is for you!
Hi everyone, this is Nick.
If you know me from Twitter, you know I’m an avid sports fan, specifically of the Celtics and Patriots.
You also might know me from random sports-related threads.
For example:
This one became very popular at the time. It began with me always hearing that “the Patriots (with Tom Brady) benefit from being in the AFC East.”
I decided to look at the numbers and see if it was true. My findings told me when they made it to the Super Bowl, they beat everyone pretty equally, and the years they didn’t they beat the AFC East a bit more, indicating they might not have been that good anyway.
I make tons of random sports related lists. Sometimes the mission isn’t clear, but it leads to gathering a lot of information that I find interesting.
I used to write before. You might remember some of my work from Hold My Drink Sports (if you wanna read an article about that Patriots thread, try here).
That was not my website, but rather that of my good friend Fredy. He presented me with a fantastic opportunity in 2017 to join his sports blog and write for him. I loved it. It gave me a chance to write about something I was extremely passionate about. I wrote tons of pieces about things that came to my mind about sports; Fredy gave me full freedom to write whatever I wanted. That led to a lot of content, which most of time featured frustrating little typos I would go fix after publishing, but overall a lot of work I was really prideful of.
I was writing pretty consistently for two years until the pandemic hit, and that led to a pause. I wasn’t complaining to be honest, I sort of needed the mental break. When sports began to return in the summer of 2020, I began writing again, but it soon started to feel like a chore. I didn’t have as many ideas as I previously had, and believe it or not it was harder to set aside time to write. By the time the Super Bowl was done in February, I was burnt out.
I wasn’t sure when - or if - that desire to write again would come back. I still kept track of random things, but I just didn’t have the joy I used to to sit down and parlay those tidbits into a blog.
That’s starting to change.
As you see, you’re reading something by me… I’m starting to get that feeling of writing again!
I never had deadlines before at Hold My Drink Sports, but it always felt like it wouldn’t be fair to the site if I wasn’t writing something at least once a week. At first that was easy when I had a ton of ideas, but when those started going away all I was writing by the end were weekly NFL power rankings; that’s not gratifying work to me, I’m not adding anything interesting to the world with that.
With this newsletter, I want to give myself control and peace of mind.
If I have a lot of ideas over a course of time, maybe you’ll notice a lot of stuff being published very quickly. If I begin to suffer from writer’s block, I won’t feel like I’m letting anyone down by taking some time to stop writing for a bit, since I’m only answering to myself.
My goal isn’t to share some cutting edge analysis, but I’ve always felt mainstream sports discourse - especially in the Boston area - is extremely toxic and takes away from the love of sports. There’s ways of talking about what’s going on without some built in guilt 24/7; it’s supposed to be fun!
You’ll see that with what I produce, and I hope you follow me along for this journey.!