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 What were you doing ten years ago today? Turning 22? How bout 14? It was a Wednesday. AIM was still socially relevant, if not in its heyday. Facebook didn't come into existence until around 2 years later. MySpace didn't even exist. Were you watching Bill Guerin score a hat trick in a 6-3 Bruins defeat of the Hurricanes? Or watching Steve Spurrier's last game as Florida's head coach, a 56-23 Orange Bowl win over ACC champion Maryland with big games from Rex Grossman, Earnest Graham, Jabar Gaffney, Brock Berlin and Taylor Jacobs. Were you still in college?, watching your team beat Morris Brown 85-38 on the day your mom went back to prison? Or were you just being appointed interim President of Argentina by the Legislative Assembly? Ten years ago Monday, I was a sophomore in high school plotting out the beginnings of a sim league. Tim had introduced me to sim leagues a few months before and I decided that it was the next step in my progression after 2+ years of running themed fantasy leagues. The American Simulation Football League soon had 12 teams with 12 coaches and plans to add the ability to create your own player and hire an assistant coach. After an admittedly disappointing first season, I went about adding to the member pool and decided to teach myself HTML over Spring Break to improve the free website of the time. Shortly thereafter it was decided to switch from running the league with a program whose name I no longer remember, to Madden 2002 (of which I still own two copies). After around a year and a half, and a few hundred emails, a sponsor was finally found to foot the $150 needed to purchase the domain (and hosting) that is still in use. If not for the original ASFL, this league might not exist, or at least the very least, would go by another name. I had to end the league's run on August 27th, 2004 with my first week of college. It took a considerable amount of work to run as it required roughly an hour per game, something impossible without two computers, plus all the time to manually calculate stats and create players. After my freshman year of college, I went about creating the ABL using OOTP which alleviated some of the time commitment from the original ASFL. I can't even begin to wrap my head around the fact that this all started ten years ago. Or that that's 40% of my life. I can't say what I was thinking I'd be doing ten years from ten years ago. I can say that I'd tell the me in existence ten years ago not to look ahead, if given the opportunity. If I've learned anything in ten years, it's that things rarely turn out how you plan them to. Just keep chugging along toward your goals, making sure to better yourself along the way. In honor of the anniversary (I want to go with X-iversary, but the XFL took place in 2001 and the Roman numeral might be lost on some), I'll be simming week 8 of season 7. I'm still a bit saddened that the league has only progressed seven weeks in 7.5 years after it's official conclusion. With half of the regular season to go, I hope to simulate the rest of the league's seventh season in the next few months as the busy fall schedule winds down. From there, I hope to be able to convert all the data from the original run into database formats that would allow me to revive the old website (on top of fixing the links that were never updated). If that task can be conquered (I'll need help), I hope to be able to build my own sim engine with which to run the league. The odds are admittedly long, but I haven't been able to shake the urge to move forward for a few weeks now. The inability to shake an idea is a large part of the reason why ASFL2 exists. Here's hoping the ten year anniversary of the ASFL2's creation is accompanied by the results of the 2016-2017 Fantasy NASCAR season, or at least the penultimate week. How have the last ten years of your life been? |
Sections: Main | Tags: League_History, ASFL_History, Website_History, Anniversary, Website_Features, Commissioner, Talk, Commish_Columns, ASFL2_History |