A brief and very incomplete search for the very first sports blog

My sports writing students at St. Bonaventure are in the middle of a three-week blogging assignment, where they pick a team and cover it on a blog of their own hosting and design. It’s a way for them to get used to both covering a beat and writing a blog. 

When I was building the lessons a few years ago, one of things I wanted to do was trace the history of sports blogging. How did this unique form of sports writing, one that in a lot of ways transformed sports media, get its start?

Turns out, that’s a harder question to answer than I thought. 

And it also turns out that the first sports blog predates the term blog itself. 

What follows is an incredibly rough incomplete first draft of my attempt to discover the first sports blog in internet history.

A brief aside to get us started.

One of the biggest lies that online life ever taught us is that “nothing ever gets deleted from the internet.” The fact is, stuff gets deleted all the time.¹ Server space is expensive and is a finite resource. This was especially true in the early days of the internet. Stop paying for web hosting, or let an account lapse, and that content we assumed would be forever is lost to the Wayback Machine in the sky. 

All of this to say, it’s probably impossible to say for sure what the first sports blog was, or the first blog in general was. But here’s what I was able to discern. If I missed something, please let me know in the comments! 

The first blog is believed to have been started in 1994, less than a year after Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and the web as we know it. Justin Hall, then an undergrad at Swarthmore College, started a personal diary online and called it Links.Net. Check it out - it’s still active to this day. 

The term blog was coined on Dec. 12, 1997 by Jorn Barger, a researcher programer who began writing an online diary on his Robot Wisdom website. He referred to his diary as a "Weblog.” The term was shortened two years later to "blog," and the name stuck.

The first sports blogs came in 1996, a year before they would even be called blogs. 

In April 1996, Bryan Hoch was a freshman at Suffern High School when he launched "Mets Online," a website that featured Mets news with original content and a message board. It was the beginning of a journalism career that saw Hoch become one of the most respected writers covering New York baseball. Hoch has covered the Yankees the MLB.com since 2007 and several books, including a recent book about Aaron Judge’s 62 home run season.   

On September 14, 1996, Gary Huckabay launched Baseball Prospectus as both a print and online publication, one that was dedicated to using advanced metrics and statistical analysis in baseball. It's seen as the spiritual successor to the famous Bill James Abstracts of the 1980s, and launched the careers of Nate Silver and Keith Law (among many others). Given the ascendance of the analytics movement and the success of the site’s alums, there’s an argument to be made that Baseball Prospectus is the most influential sports blog. 

The most wholesome story of a sports blog comes from Louisiana. On Dec. 17. 1996,  Scott Long purchased a website for his father, Don, who was a writer and huge LSU football fan. Don would type his reports on a computer and email them to Scott, who would post them at DandyDon.com. Except for a couple days early on, Don emailed Scott a post to publish every day for 15 years. Don died in 2012, and Scott has kept the site going to this day.

Looking back, these are the first three sports blogs that I could find, and they run the gamut of what blogging was and what it became. 

By the late 1990s, blogging was become a larger part of the corporate sports journalism world.   America Online (AOL) created Digital City sites in major cities like Boston. A part-time sports writer and bartender in Boston convinced editors at Digital City Boston to start running his sports columns, which he published as the Boston Sports Guy. Sports By Brooks launched in 2001 and was, in the words of Awful Announcing, "a hybrid of sports & entertainment news, gossip, opinion, and a healthy dose of scantily-clad women." 

There’s an entire post to be written about 2005, which is the year SB Nation, Bleacher Report and Deadspin all began. That’s a project for a later date. 

1.  Try to find any of the stories I wrote at The Times Herald or the Press & Sun-Bulletin. Better still, try to easily find the blogs that I kept for Binghamton University basketball.