Holy cow, we’re officially one-year old today!

We meant to write this earlier in the day, but, the Delaware Thunder name and logo started to leak so we had to get a post up on that, and then we found out that a long-running Senior AAA league in Canada may go under, and had to get something up on that.

But here we are.

Honestly, I’m not even really sure what to say, because when we started this project, just kind of on a whim and seemingly out of nowhere, we had no real expectations for what it might eventually turn into.

All we knew was that leagues like the FHL, SPHL, junior and senior hockey had great stories, chaos, drama, and then some hockey games on top of it all, and it was a world of hockey that wasn’t covered enough or given the attention it deserved.

We didn’t know if 2,000 people would read it, 20,000 people would read it, or if it would be a flop that we would stop caring about after a couple months. Well, one year later we did nearly 220,000 views in that time, and that’s with missing about a month and a half of time with weddings, new jobs, and just life getting in the way. That’s an astounding number for us, and have a marketing budget of $0 shows that we’re doing something right to get that many readers for a site that started out of nothing.

Since starting, we added one more writer to the site, who covers a lot of Canadian stuff for us, and I think it’s been a great addition and something we look forward to more of in the future. We’ve had fans write guest posts for us just because they wanted to share their opinion with us and the rest of the hockey world, and I think that’s really fun and cool.

And almost daily we see new notifications that a coach, or player, or GM, or scout, somebody that’s involved in the hockey world that either now follows us on social media, or likes something we wrote. And that’s a hell of a compliment, at least in our minds, to have real hockey people enjoying what we’ve done to this point.

I’m insanely proud of the work we’ve done here, and never imagined we would be breaking stories that would go national and be read by people in more than 100 different countries. We were the ones who got the email from the FHL Officiating Supervisor who called it quits after a team owner pushed a ref at a team, a story that eventually got coverage from ESPN, NBC Sports, The Hockey News, and who knows how many others, but we were first with it. We were first finding the new Danbury team name and logos. We were in the building at the FHL Commissioner’s Cup when a player went after a fan, getting video of the incident and having probably close to a dozen TV outlets reach out asking for the video. We got to edit stuff written by Eli Gold, a hero to a couple of us here at the site!

There’s just so many cool things that we have done at this site, that it’s kind of insane to look back on it all and read some of what we have done so far, and virtually none of it being game recaps or the usual day-to-day coverage of hockey like you traditionally see.

I know we’ve made some enemies along the way and have people who aren’t fans of the site for whatever reason, but that’s fine, we know we can’t please everyone, but dang if we didn’t try. We really have tried to bring a different perspective to minor league and junior hockey than you would normally get, and hope that you all have enjoyed what we do and hope to continue to do. We want to be the place where you read things you wouldn’t anywhere else.

But more than anything, we just want to say thank you to all of you who have read something on the site, followed us on social media, shared stories, commented, emailed, or interacted with the page in some way, whether that’s complimentary, criticizing, offering tips, or just reaching out to find out more about the site.

Seriously, you all reading is why we keep doing this and want to keep doing it. I know page views aren’t everything, but it sure does give you a little bit more motivation when you have hundreds and even thousands of people potentially reading something you write.

So yeah, thank you for making this one heck of a year at Bus League Hockey, and please feel free to reach out to us with compliments, criticism, or just flat out suggestions of things that you would like to see covered or discussed here in the future, and we’ll do our best to respond or make it happen.

Thanks for reading, and let’s hope we have many more years of this left.

-The Bus League Hockey Staff,
Ron, Shawn, Mat