One Year of Basketball Beeswax

Just like that, Basketball Beeswax is one year old. It feels like just yesterday that I was up at 3am designing on Google Sites, surrounded by Pop-Tart crumbs with my TV rambling on about Carole Baskin. 365 days later, I'm still up writing at 3am. The only difference between then and now might be the relevance of underground exotic animal trading, for better or worse.

In this time span, I've had less pageviews than Dillon Brooks has quality offensive decisions, and that's saying something. I've still yet to monetize any form of the site like I planned to early on. At this point, that seems unnecessary. My iffy kinda-once-a-month posting schedule might hurt advertisers based off pure association. I'm a 17-year-old kid after all, give me a break.

Disregarding the innumerable failures I've experienced throughout my brief life to this point, I can't say Basketball Beeswax is one of them. At bare minimum, this can serve as a file for my writing portfolio thus far. That alone is a good enough reason to keep maintaining the site. However, Basketball Beeswax is much more than just a glorified virtual notebook. While I don't expect this to ever become a grand multimedia giant akin to Bleacher Report, The Ringer, Barstool Sports, etc. I do see it as an extension of everything I do these days. Creating and running Basketball Beeswax accidentally unlocked a previously dormant intangible in my life: passion.

After just a few weeks of consistent writing and posting, I knew I had struck gold. Obviously not gold as a financial equivalent, as established earlier in the article, but gold in the metaphorical realm of personality. It didn't take long before Basketball Beeswax was the first thing I thought of when I woke up and the last thing on my mind as I laid down to sleep.

This obsession reached it's peak during the NBA Bubble's seeding games when my already sleep-deprived mind decided to write a daily full-length blog and individual game breakdown for every day of the Bubble. In what seemed like just five seconds of decision-making, The Quarantitle was born. Upon re-reading some of my Quarantitle posts, I realized that I might've reached my apex-mountain before the said mountain was even in sight. Not to sound overly cocky, but some of those small paragraph critiques were perfect for the tone I hoped to establish with this site.

That being said, myself and my three loyal readers knew that such a series could never last. After a week or so of daily 900-1200 word pieces, the Quarantitle came to an end. For my own mental and physical health's sake, this was a good thing. I distinctly remember one night where I dozed off mid-typing only to wake up and find three full and coherent sentences about Back to the Future 2, true story.

As admittedly pitiful as that sounds, I loved every minute of it. This has been the first time in my life where I'm totally in control of my path towards something I love. Basketball Beeswax has legitimized my dream in a way that few things in my life will. The days of impulsively ranking my top 30 all-time players on the corner of desks in school and rambling to whoever will listen are over.

About two months ago, I was given the opportunity to join a young media site called Music Movies and Hoops. The experience has been nothing but fantastic so far and I'll be focusing the majority of my time on it in the coming year.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is no longer a dream. This is real. I look forward to checking back in with you in a year to see the improvements made. If 2021 is anything like 2020, I'll be further than ever before.