Hello everybody, wanted to pop on here and say hello and introduce myself. Whenever I'm away from here for a while and come back I always feel like the meme of Troy in Community (Donald Glover) coming back with the pizza for game night to see the apartment on fire and half his friends possessed and running around screaming.
I'm JD Walker, the guy lucky (?) enough to be taking over for the amazing @Halldan1 this summer. NGL, I feel like I'm inheriting a house that's burning down and I'm still racking my brain figuring out how to rebuild the place. Dan didn't start the fire, but we have lots of pyros around here. Please bear with me as I work on the building plans over the next few months leading up to the start of the season. Hopefully we will have some good news to discuss soon. This site will not be my full time job as I have a corporate full time job with a long commute and my Pirate Queen is not much into sports despite years of trying her best to tolerate my Pirates obsession so I will not have nearly as many hours available as Dan has been putting in over the years. As a result I am building a team of folks to help me, but currently I am undergoing some medical treatment which is obviously priority 1.
Some of you know me from my regular posts here over the years, a few of you know me in person, some of you are completely new (welcome!) or just don't know me at all. I'm the co-founder of Stream Punk Entertainment, a multimedia Artist Collective blending old school reporting with new school streaming platforms, with all of the writers, photographers, artists and creative thinkers in between. We have over 30 contributors covering multiple sports and cinema, comics, pop culture conventions, and more! College basketball is my specialty, with a bit of dabbling in US professional soccer.
My personal CV: I grew up in Monmouth County and was terrible at playing sports despite my best efforts. It was probably for the best as I would have surely shredded my ACL a few times by now. I joined my school's varsity basketball program as a manager during my freshman year to be a part of something awesome and get more involved at what turned out to be the perfect time. I was lucky enough to be sitting on the sidelines (and later in the canopy doing game film) for one of the most dominant runs in Shore Conference history, as CBA went 52-2 in my first two seasons, winning South Jersey Non-Public A and losing the state championship game on a buzzer beater, 3 Shore conference titles in 4 seasons, beating St Anthony's twice, and reaching a national rank as high as #9 in USA today, ahead of Lebron's SVSM (Ohio) high school squad his freshman and sophomore years and just behind Tyson Chandler's Dominguez (CA) team. From those teams I learned what good coaching is, the importance of building a system and practicing it to execute to perfection. I came to SHU and was a manager on the 2003-04 team that made the second round of NCAAs, one of the two NCAA Tournament victories Seton Hall has since Sha hung up his #10 jersey for the last time. I was not nearly as involved in that team as the low freshman on the totem pole working only practices and some home games, with no travel but it was still a full time job in itself in addition to a full course load so I burnt out. (No NCAA mandated practice time limits for managers!) Sophomore year I shifted over to WSOU, working as a sportscaster, DJ, and Assistant Promotions director over the course of my time there. After not finding a sports job after graduating SHU with a Business/Sports Management degree in 2007 I went into corporate hell, where I remain today but now with the most fun side business in the world as technology now allows us to do the things ourselves that we couldn't get hired to do back then.
All of that varied experience in addition to internships with the NJ Jackals and NJ Nets, and dabbling in high school theater put me in a unique spot to show my passion to others, and I want to carry that on with Piratecrew and the Trove going forward. The content that traditionally fueled the Trove doesn't fully exist anymore in the same form, so there will be some experimenting with a few different things I have been covering the Pirates (and occasionally Villanova since I currently live near Philly) for Stream Punk Sports since 2022, so I have been attending the press conferences (yes I was in the room for the infamous "Sha-splosion" at Zags a few years back). I believe strongly in filming and posting full press conferences and player interviews for context. The writers pick out the best ones for print since there's only so much space there, but absent much other "inside" information from the current regime, the pressers are the best window into Sha's thinking that we have are those press conferences which we film for our channel and I do ask questions when I have something good to ask that one of the reporters before me didn't already ask.
I'm looking forward to building something great here, but please give me a chance to catch my bearings and bear with me during the growing pains. Thank you for your continued support!
One last thing, a new code of conduct for this board will be composed and enforced by the moderators. Violations will be subject to warnings, suspensions of posting privileges, or other sanctions up to and including permanent bans (with no refunds of your Trove subscription since you broke the rules). I am asking you nicely to please clean up the personal attacks, denigrating people for their occupations, childish name calling, and other assorted bad behavior which has become commonplace here. This junk will not be tolerated anymore. It's the biggest problem with this site and any time I mention it to other Pirate fans who aren't on here, they all cite the bad behavior as a massive turnoff. We're all adults here and it would be a far better place if all of us started acting like it.
Cheers!
JD Walker
I'm JD Walker, the guy lucky (?) enough to be taking over for the amazing @Halldan1 this summer. NGL, I feel like I'm inheriting a house that's burning down and I'm still racking my brain figuring out how to rebuild the place. Dan didn't start the fire, but we have lots of pyros around here. Please bear with me as I work on the building plans over the next few months leading up to the start of the season. Hopefully we will have some good news to discuss soon. This site will not be my full time job as I have a corporate full time job with a long commute and my Pirate Queen is not much into sports despite years of trying her best to tolerate my Pirates obsession so I will not have nearly as many hours available as Dan has been putting in over the years. As a result I am building a team of folks to help me, but currently I am undergoing some medical treatment which is obviously priority 1.
Some of you know me from my regular posts here over the years, a few of you know me in person, some of you are completely new (welcome!) or just don't know me at all. I'm the co-founder of Stream Punk Entertainment, a multimedia Artist Collective blending old school reporting with new school streaming platforms, with all of the writers, photographers, artists and creative thinkers in between. We have over 30 contributors covering multiple sports and cinema, comics, pop culture conventions, and more! College basketball is my specialty, with a bit of dabbling in US professional soccer.
My personal CV: I grew up in Monmouth County and was terrible at playing sports despite my best efforts. It was probably for the best as I would have surely shredded my ACL a few times by now. I joined my school's varsity basketball program as a manager during my freshman year to be a part of something awesome and get more involved at what turned out to be the perfect time. I was lucky enough to be sitting on the sidelines (and later in the canopy doing game film) for one of the most dominant runs in Shore Conference history, as CBA went 52-2 in my first two seasons, winning South Jersey Non-Public A and losing the state championship game on a buzzer beater, 3 Shore conference titles in 4 seasons, beating St Anthony's twice, and reaching a national rank as high as #9 in USA today, ahead of Lebron's SVSM (Ohio) high school squad his freshman and sophomore years and just behind Tyson Chandler's Dominguez (CA) team. From those teams I learned what good coaching is, the importance of building a system and practicing it to execute to perfection. I came to SHU and was a manager on the 2003-04 team that made the second round of NCAAs, one of the two NCAA Tournament victories Seton Hall has since Sha hung up his #10 jersey for the last time. I was not nearly as involved in that team as the low freshman on the totem pole working only practices and some home games, with no travel but it was still a full time job in itself in addition to a full course load so I burnt out. (No NCAA mandated practice time limits for managers!) Sophomore year I shifted over to WSOU, working as a sportscaster, DJ, and Assistant Promotions director over the course of my time there. After not finding a sports job after graduating SHU with a Business/Sports Management degree in 2007 I went into corporate hell, where I remain today but now with the most fun side business in the world as technology now allows us to do the things ourselves that we couldn't get hired to do back then.
All of that varied experience in addition to internships with the NJ Jackals and NJ Nets, and dabbling in high school theater put me in a unique spot to show my passion to others, and I want to carry that on with Piratecrew and the Trove going forward. The content that traditionally fueled the Trove doesn't fully exist anymore in the same form, so there will be some experimenting with a few different things I have been covering the Pirates (and occasionally Villanova since I currently live near Philly) for Stream Punk Sports since 2022, so I have been attending the press conferences (yes I was in the room for the infamous "Sha-splosion" at Zags a few years back). I believe strongly in filming and posting full press conferences and player interviews for context. The writers pick out the best ones for print since there's only so much space there, but absent much other "inside" information from the current regime, the pressers are the best window into Sha's thinking that we have are those press conferences which we film for our channel and I do ask questions when I have something good to ask that one of the reporters before me didn't already ask.
I'm looking forward to building something great here, but please give me a chance to catch my bearings and bear with me during the growing pains. Thank you for your continued support!
One last thing, a new code of conduct for this board will be composed and enforced by the moderators. Violations will be subject to warnings, suspensions of posting privileges, or other sanctions up to and including permanent bans (with no refunds of your Trove subscription since you broke the rules). I am asking you nicely to please clean up the personal attacks, denigrating people for their occupations, childish name calling, and other assorted bad behavior which has become commonplace here. This junk will not be tolerated anymore. It's the biggest problem with this site and any time I mention it to other Pirate fans who aren't on here, they all cite the bad behavior as a massive turnoff. We're all adults here and it would be a far better place if all of us started acting like it.
Cheers!
JD Walker
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