SORSN: 20 Year Anniversary

October 26, 2023 SQ Misc 0

This is a story of how a few young guys with too much free time stumbled into an obsession and established a community web site that is now entering its 20th year.  

The hunt for Saddam Hussein was beginning with the start of the Iraq War. SARS virus had the public on edge at the sound of a cough. 50 Cent’s “In da Club” topped the music charts. The Matrix Reloaded dominated the box office and SORSN.com – The South of the River Sports Network launched. The year was 2003. 

I had been married for a couple years, no kids and had either a lot or some free time on my hands. I was regularly attending the Midway football games as my wife and I had cousins on both sides of the family who were playing for the Greenwave. The Midway team had been experiencing success and certainly had the community’s attention under new head coach and MHS alum, Craig Moser.  The 2001 team went 10-3 on the season, making it to the 3rd round (quarter finals) of the playoffs. In 2002, the team went 6-5 with several notable wins but were knocked out of the playoffs by a good Cloudland team who came up just short of the state championship. In his early tenure, Coach Moser had created excitement in the program and embarked on resurrecting the phrase “South of the River”, a label proudly worn and spoken by residents of the area in the 70s and 80s. The SOR chant started to become the unofficial battle cry of the Wave and the athletic program overall was again experiencing some long awaited success.

But it was what happened after these games in 2002 that eventually led a small group of friends and family to the creation of SORSN over the next year. Following Friday nights standing alongside fellow fence walkers during the 2002 season, I’d send out a late night “game writeup” email or Yahoo chat room message (dial up AOL anyone) to a few friends and family members scattered across the Southeast – namely Michael Rose, Randy Rose, Archie Edgemon and Travis Jackson. These game recap messages mostly consisted of light-hearted jabs at family members playing (i.e. Myers boys), pokes at local media coverage (or lack thereof) and a general discussion about the goings on of the community centered near the intersection of Highway 72 and Highway 58. These sessions would then always lead to an exchange of “remember when” or “one time we were playing….”.  Now the accuracy of these stories was always questionable, frequently embellished over time and the failed attempt of becoming sports writers was gracefully overlooked, but what stood out was the pure entertainment gold in the stories being exchanged between this small group of Midway alum and SportsCenter host wannabes. 

Flash forward to the start of the 2003 football season. A growing email catalog of valuable content made it clear that we needed a way to preserve it all, and perhaps share it with additional family and friends. This is when long time friend Jared Davis envisioned a solution. Jared brought the perfect blend of Midway history, sports and technical knowledge to the team.  Like all of us in the group, Jared had deep Midway roots. Jared and I graduated together in ‘96 where we played football and basketball together, his older brother Trevor was a member of some of the best football teams in Midway history, and his mom taught many years at Midway elementary. In the fall of 2003 and what was likely more than 24 hours of a Yahoo chat room conversation between the two of us (fueled by Mountain Dews and Doritos), Jared had created the foundation of the web site. 

How did the name South of the River Sports Network come about?  As I mentioned earlier, the “SOR” chant and SOR apparel had gained in popularity in recent seasons so we were looking to build upon that. My memory is a little fuzzy but the best I can recall it was during another Yahoo instant message between Jared and I when we were working out the details of the web site that would be built. Our conversations described it as a parody of ESPN SportsCenter (think Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick era), and I believe it was Jared that coined the term the South of the River Sports Network and styled it in the same font as ESPN. I then registered the domain name – SORSN.com – and the rest, well, you know the saying.  

The first ever post to sorsn.com was on November 24th. We weren’t exactly ready to go live at the time but we received word of the birth of one of our founders first child in the far off land of South Carolina. Newborn Olivia Rose, daughter of Michael and Casonya Rose graced the cover of the launch of SORSN.com. A birth announcement? Again, remember that the original audience of sorsn.com was a small group of friends and family.  After all, who would want to visit a website about Midway or the South of the River community?  

The start of the website in the fall of 2003 consisted of football and basketball write-ups with a targeted audience of about 15 people. But that all changed rather quickly one evening when Jared and I were looking over the traffic numbers of the web site.  We noticed that 100 people had visited the site.  Wait, what? We both joked about who in the world would be visiting the site!  The numbers continued to grow day over day. I vividly remember Jared asking “who even knows about the website?” It was then when we learned of our marketing team: Craig Moser and a chalkboard.  Coach Moser had learned of the site and started to read the writeups. Moser obviously knew quality literature when he saw it so he decided to spread the word and used his expert skills learned from Midway legend, Ralph King, to help sculpt content. 

Coach Craig Moser was gracious enough to recount how things came about from his side so many years ago.

At that time Shawn’s sister, Amy Woody, was the bookkeeper at MHS.  I was a frequent visitor to her office, usually getting fussed at because of PO’s.  She started reading me the fine literary content that was graceful written in the group email that he would send about our previous game.   It was a factual, humorous description of the past Fridays events in the Emerald Forest.  

At some point, stories from the past started creeping in on the responses.  I started giving funny stories that happened when Michael Rose and I played football and basketball together at MHS.  Others provided stories that made it a whole lot of fun.  When Amy told me that Shawn had put his journalistic integrity on the line and created a website, SORSN.COM, I was hooked.  

We at that time were trying to promote the Greenwave football program and the players.  The SOR merchandise we started selling was a huge hit and the football team was playing with toughness and PRIDE.  I went daily to every classroom I could and wrote SORSN.COM on the whiteboard.  I got to the point of promoting the site and its coverage by writing, “SORSN.COM – Covered OUR way, the SOR way”, on the boards.   We also made flyers with the cheerleaders to put on the players locker on game day;  Something like – Good Luck #5 Spencer Myers – SORSN.COM.  

Thanks Shawn and crew for what you did for MHS at that time.  These are good, long lasting memories.  #FAMILY

– Craig Moser

To further clarify, SORSN was never meant to be a journey into serious journalism and was definitely written with a green bias.  It was initially created for a small group of friends so that they could share funny stories, capture some tales handed down for generations (some of them perhaps tall tales), memories of coaches, teammates, pictures and news about the events in their lives.  Word of the site spread and the audience grew beyond the original group of friends and family.

The intention then shifted to build an online community that would hopefully reflect some of the sports related life of the South of the River community and more importantly, a place to share some of the treasured memories and pride that many of us have for the community we call home. 

In 2007 following one of the highest traffic years for SORSN, Jared and I hinted at expanding to the other parts of the county, allowing other schools to use our model and set up a destination for each school. I even purchased the domain name RoaneCountySportsNetwork with the intention of rolling it out. But with each of us with young families of our own, we barely had time to keep up with what had already been built and our expansion was soon laid to rest.

20 years have gone by and all we can say is wow and thanks. We would like to take a minute to reflect and thank all our contributors, readers and all the characters over the years who have been a part of SORSN.com. The kids we covered in the early days are now adults with kids of their own and many of those legends we wrote about are no longer with us. We hope you have enjoyed the site and thank you for allowing us to be a very small part of your lives.
– Shawn Queener

Now that I’ve shared how SORSN came to be, I wanted to acknowledge those fellow co-founders as well as those who contributed and helped it grow over the years.

 

Michael Rose was ground zero of not only the early email exchanges but also wrote or contributed to several of the stories and interviews featured on the site. Many of which are considered Pulitzer Prize worthy (all credit to Ms. Henley)  These include:

Jared Davis was not only responsible for the building of the first site, he was also the designer behind our popular Player of the Game posters. The Waves and the website were a hot topic in 2007. The football team, led by the Four Horsemen, was winning – going 9-1 in the regular season and on their way deep into the playoffs. Traffic to the website was at an all-time high with several thousand visits per month. Yes, several thousand visitors per month were pointing their browser to sorsn.com. One of the weekly highlights on the web site was our Player of the Game which included a custom poster created by Jared. Many of these posters can be seen on the gallery section of SORSN <link>. The awesome works of art provided these players with a memento that many still proudly display today (despite their wives opinion of what should or shouldn’t be hanging above the fireplace mantel). 

Archie Edgemon provided our readers with a tremendous amount of history. The quality of his stories are unmatched. 

Randy Rose and Ronnie Woody provided countless amounts of memories and stories including:

Travis Jackson was the second shooter, unlike his basketball days when he refused to pass the ball to anyone. For several years, Travis joined me along the sidelines with his camera allowing us to capture game photos from both sidelines and providing parents with a plethora of photos to print.

Greg Jones became SORSN’s first and only outdoors editor. In 2007, SORSN expanded beyond the sidelines to the outdoor sports of hunting and fishing. Greg Jones was our chief correspondent, providing fishing reports and sharing his wealth of knowledge of the great outdoors for 6 years. Greg was known for his tagline, take someone fishing, which he ended each article with and still practices to this day. Greg is a great outdoorsman and blended into the SORSN community seamlessly. Over the years, sorsn.com has changed web platforms and as a result, we lost several articles and some of our older content during the transition – many of which were Greg’s outdoor reports.  However, there are still several complete articles still available, including:

Barry Narramore has likely been mentioned or referenced on SORSN 100 times more than any other person (runner-up is Marvelous Mike Hayes).  From his all green wardrobe, his epic yearbook photos and his refusal to pick anyone other than Midway on the pick panel,  Barry “Boo” Narramore has provided SORSN editors and readers with plenty of material and content over the 20 year span. For several years, Barry was also our softball correspondent where he would provide game recaps as well as photos taken with his Polaroid SX70. Boo has always been a great sport and we offer many thanks for his contributions

The SORSN Pick Panel has been a feature on the web site for 12 years and returned this year after a 7 year hiatus. We’ve had many great panel members over the years and we are thankful for their time and contributions to the web site. Our panel members have included:

Amber Johnson, Ralton Emory,Barry Narramore, Michael Rose, Randy Rose, Jeff Hill, Kyle Canup, Tyson Canup, Steven Sears, Tony Clower, Jason Lloyd, Chris Barry, Ethan Crabtree and Travis Jackson.  You can see all the picks from years past under the football section of sorsn <link>. 

From the very beginning, the website featured a SORSN Cover Photo. These cover photos were meant to capture the season and give the website a fresh look periodically – but the cover photos became more than that. It became a request that we would hear at least once at every sporting event we were at.  “Put me on the cover!”  “Is that gonna be on the cover?”  “Please don’t put that on the cover!”. So thank you to all those that made the cover…either with or without your permission. You can see all the past cover photos under the sorsn.com galleries <link>. We will be having a vote for the best cover photo as part of the 20 year anniversary.  Stay tuned to the SORSN Facebook page for more information.

Show Us Your SOR was a segment that we featured on the web site during the early years. SOR and SORSN merchandise was a hot item and we encouraged our readers to share with us how and where SOR was being represented – think traveling gnome. The photos that were shared with us were entertaining and some possibly criminal. Check them out in the gallery <link>.

The SORSN wave has been part of the website header design since its inception. The website has undergone several redesigns during the 20 years but the wave photo has also been included in some form. Where did the photo come from?  The “wave” in the photo is actually about a 2” high tide wash –  the remains of a wave.  The macro photo was taken while laying flat in the sand along the beaches of St. Joseph Peninsula, a popular vacation spot of the Queener’s in the early 2000’s.

There is a long list of people that I’m sure we have left off that contributed greatly to SORSN.com over the years, including our wives who graciously ignored our childish late nights of write-ups, interviews, photo editing, etc. Many of the reader contributions can be found under the My SOR section on the web site. The My SOR section includes:

Again, thank you to all those that have contributed and helped SORSN to 20 years!

 

(Note if you’re going back through some older articles: Due to migrating to different web platforms over the years, some articles and photos did not transfer correctly and unfortunately were lost along the way.)