Sports away

Sports are a big part of my life, that should go without saying. But I didn't realize just how big until I didn't have time for them anymore.

A year and a half ago, when I was thinking about starting a blog, the decision to make it a sports blog seemed a no-brainer. Sports were what I spent my free time doing -- whether playing, watching, or reading about. I am that girl that carries her bracket, and a highlighter, to the bar with her in March. I'm the girl who can't make plans on Saturdays during autumn, 'cause I already know I'm going to be somewhere in front of a TV. I'm the girl who counts down the days until the World Cup kicks off, whose chosen way to spend Friday nights in college was attending UF women's soccer matches, who studied abroad during Europameisterschaft 2008 and would make dedicated trips to the computer lab on campus so I could log on to ESPN.com and read up on the German team's injury reports.

When I joined Twitter, I first and foremost followed sportswriters. I used the service almost exclusively in the early years as a source of news regarding my beloved Gators. The first time I was retweeted by a major personality (Mark Schlabach) it made my week, and the moment I knew Twitter as a platform was something special was the day Lane Kiffin announced he was leaving Tennessee. Footage of the student riot that erupted outside the Vols' athletic complex went viral after a UT basketball player posted a video he'd taken from his dorm room window, and I realized the talk about us all being citizen journalists now was more than just a platitude.

A year and a half ago I told my roommate I was thinking about starting a blog, and she laughed at the suggestion that I might choose to write about anything but sports. She'd sat through enough afternoons of me breaking down college football rivalries for hours at a time to know that this was the thing I was most passionate about in the world.

But something strange happened over the last year -- namely, I became a speechwriter, and then a pollster, and now a commentator on political issues. I started following researchers and politicos on Twitter instead of coaches and athletes. I started reading eleven newspapers a day, none of them SI. And I started writing op-eds about politics instead of blog posts about sports.

It turns out I don't have the energy to be obsessed with two things at once. I realized that last Thursday, as I settled in to watch the college football season opener -- an SEC matchup, no less! -- and ended up switching over to CSPAN after half an hour. See, the Republican National Convention was happening contemporaneously, and I couldn't stand not having it on. Even if it meant not watching the game I'd been waiting for all summer.

I fully expect this to be a temporary change. Presidential elections don't come along every season, after all. But the fact that this blog lay dormant through the Olympics and the Stanley Cup and Euro 2012 says something. I've wanted to write -- about the Penn State sanctions, about Team USA's soccer gold, about my undying hatred for the Boston Bruins. I've wanted to write, and yet I haven't. Other things came up.

I guess my love for sports is undiminished. My time for them is not.