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And that's a wrap.
Yet another year of collegiate competition is in the books.
The completion of the National Championships marks the third outdoor season and the second full year of coverage for The Stride Report. For those of you who have stayed with us since the beginning, your loyalty and support is beyond appreciated. For those of you who are still relatively new to TSR, welcome! We're glad to have you on board.
And for everyone in between? Well, you're pretty cool too.
With collegiate action now at an end, we decided to go over a few things to keep you all in the loop of what we have in store for the next few weeks (as well as the rest of the summer).
The State of TSR
Our growth has been phenomenal this year. Not only are we seeing significant traffic come through the site on a consistent basis, but we are making encouraging leaps when it comes to site visitors. Still, I'd be lying if I said everything was perfect. The progression of our site metrics hasn't always been linear and although we are happy with the traffic that we are currently driving, we are far from satisfied with it.
Of course, these things take time. TSR is made up of 10 contributors who are involved with some combination of being full-time students, full-time employees, collegiate or post-grad athletes, and just regular humans with social lives. The fact that we can even get 10 people to generate content on a consistent basis is a miracle in and of itself.
Helping Us Grow
We do no paid marketing. All of our growth has been 100% organic thanks to readers who were nice enough to spread the word via Twitter, Instagram, or other third-party sites. It's taken some time, but the approach works.
So if you believe that we bring value to the sport, give us a follow on our social media platforms (Twitter and Instagram). Tell your teammates about all of the cool things we are doing. Tell your mom. Tell your dad. Tell your brother, sister, dog, cat, and even the weird kid who lives down the street. Quite frankly, tell everyone who will listen.
More people knowing about us means that we can do more things and hopefully reach the point where we're talking to sponsors. That means funding, which means more time dedicated to the site, which means more content, which means actual meet coverage, which means interviews, which means...well, you get the point.
Of course, in order to earn your recommendation, we need to continue generating unique, high-quality content. That much is a given. Admittedly, we're not always perfect and we make mistakes on occasion. When we do, it truly bothers me and I know it bothers most of the other writers. Still, I'm incredibly proud of everything we publish and I strongly believe that we provide a net benefit to the sport.
The last thing you can do to help is to go over to our FEEDBACK page and answer a few quick questions for us. We read every single comment that you provide.
Content for the Next Couple of Weeks
The next week for TSR will consist of a handful of different things. Over the next few days, we will wrap up coverage of the outdoor season by reviewing our TSR Draft results as well as posting some final rankings.
Once those are finished, we will begin to slowly shift our attention to some features, revisiting storylines, general discussion, and (of course) the introduction to cross country.
Summer Content
Prepare yourselves. Summer rankings are coming back and they will be better than ever.
With a staff that is over three times as large as what we had last summer, our research and coverage will be extensive. We will have all hands on deck for when those begin.
Our first set of rankings will be the Recruit Rankings which are set to begin near the end of June. Once those are complete, we'll pass the time with a handful of other articles while we prep our XC Top 50 Individuals and XC Top 25 Teams. We don't have an official timeline on those rankings yet, but you can expect those rankings to take up parts of July and most of August.
Project Blue
Could be tomorrow, could be next year.
We don't know.
Stay tuned.