Saturday's game, that amazing blowout win over the Columbus Crew happened to be the closest home match to the three year anniversary of this very site. While it was nice for the Seattle Sounders to set a record with goals scored to celebrate Sounder at Heart's birthday, even better was using my extra ticket to take a man who is certainly not a soccer fan, but is the biggest fan of this site who doesn't pay attention to the team.
Three years ago this site was an idea that I got talked into by one Jason Churchill of Prospect Insider. He inspired me to take the way I had applied myself to baseball and basketball at KJR and online with his other projects and do it for a sport he knew I loved. And then he offered to sub-let space on his server, teach me how to use wordpress and guide me through the launch process.
Finally Churchill saw the team that has inspired this passion in me. He did the March to the Match. During pregame we talked about the upcoming game (I predicted a Seattle win with a total of 4 goals scored - oops), the culture he'd see in the stands and the friends that season ticket holders can make nearby. I tagged two players for him to watch, players with skillsets that anyone can recognize as being good without knowing the nuance of the game - Osvaldo Alonso and Mike Fucito.
At the end of the day he came away impressed not just by Fucito and Alonso, but by the entire team. Six-two wins will do that. He also was impressed by the call and repeat, the boom-boom-clap, the ECS, the Fucito song and church. An avid non-soccer fan, he enjoyed it enough that his "day with Dave that happened to include soccer" may be repeated. He still won't watch a game on TV, but he may be in CenturyLink Field again.
This effort at soccer evangelism probably started nearly 5 years ago. It wound up with me launching a website and just yesterday resulted in a day of solid entertainment helped by a great team and all of you who were in the stadium, and honestly everyone that reads this site has been part of it as well.