The Time Has Come To Bid You All Farewell

In my time here at SOTU (formerly The 7^th Floor), I have posted over 300 articles, countless comments, and numerous other pieces of what I like to think was fairly easy reading. Yet, out of all of those works, nothing is harder for me to write than this.

Due to what I shall call extenuating personal circumstances, I will be leaving State Of The U. Regardless of whether this will be a long-term temporary thing, or if it will wind up being something that sticks, it remains difficult for me to do.

I started out on the site as a normal commenter, like most of you. I had not had any blogging experience, let along blog management experience, before I started posting. After a few comments, I got the nerve to put out a few FanPosts regarding my feelings on Al Golden and other topics. The powers that be at SB Nation saw that The 7^th Floor was struggling, and they also saw me posting quite often with my opinions, and they asked me if I would be interested in coming on board. Of course I accepted this challenge, thinking that I would work with the then-current manager to try and bring the blog back to something more than a half-broken RSS feed. However, my passion for the Miami Hurricanes, and for expressing my thoughts through print gave way to me being offered the chance to not only help the blog get back to prominence, but spearhead the effort as the manager.

I brought in a few people to help me in my quest, and even joined forces with Jerry and Josh from a blog called Category 6, growing our site's footprint that much more. From there, things skyrocketed over the course of the first year. Almost every metric doubled, readership went up, the Twitter account took hold and the followers jumped through the roof. We had a presence on Facebook that grew into a budding community. Basically, the blog was alive again, being recognized not only by our peers and fans, but perhaps most importantly by the University Of Miami. We were able to be fully credentialed in both basketball and football, have access to practices, information, and a direct relationship with the SID staff. This, for a non-alumni, out of state fan, was perhaps one of the coolest aspects about what I was doing (that is, of course, until I got the chance to personally interview Howard Schnellenberger (Sorry Yandle and Freet)).

My time here has seemingly been short, but it has been extremely rewarding. I was able to form relationships with my team of writers, meet new people through social networking, and meet a litany of people who also worked at SB Nation. My hope is to eventually be able to return to the site in whatever capacity the new leadership will have me, but I cannot make that decision at this moment. Real life, and more importantly, my family, will always come first. I will miss providing you all with whatever Hurricanes knowledge, opinion, facts, and humor I possibly could, as best as I possibly could. I will of course still be as present on the site, as a reader, as I can be, and will be following this season along with the entirety of the fan base. Hell, I may even make an appearance or two (or all of them) in the Game Threads.

I cannot express the pride I have because I can say I worked alongside the other writers on this site. I am confident that they will continue to thrive here, and this site will continue to grow. So please, keep reading the site. Keep clicking in and making this one of the best gigs around.

And most of all, Go Canes.