By Michael Adams
madams@austinsportsjournal.com

A well-kept secret is that today, Aug. 31, is the Austin Sports Journal’s birthday. 

I came home after covering a game for the Dallas Morning News and mapped out an idea on a piece of paper.  

 The next day, I bought the URL for onthesidelinessports.com, created a logo and started posting things to a website. I just built everything as I went along through trial and error. (More error than I’d like to admit)

I took out a few hundred dollars from my savings and bought a camera, video equipment and a microphone. 

My initial plan was to cover all sports in the Austin area and provide an alternative to traditional sports coverage. That proved to be a little tougher than I thought it would be. 

So as the football season went on, I narrowed down my coverage plans to high schools and put the focus on highlighting the talented athletes in the Austin area. 

And it grew.

And grew some more. 

And then some more. 

It grew so fast that I had a hard time keeping up.

If the current traffic trends continue, the Austin Sports Journal website will hit its one millionth lifetime page view sometime in late October or early November. 

A lot has changed in the last year. 

I re-branded from On the Sidelines Sports to the Austin Sports Journal to more align with what I really wanted this to be – a newspaper, albeit a digital newspaper. 

The irony is, I never really considered publishing an e-paper or magazines when initially putting all this together. It’s just sort of evolved into all this. 

And we are with the first issue of the Austin Sports Journal on the company’s first birthday! 

 I can’t thank you all enough. If it wasn’t for each and everyone of you, I wouldn’t be here.