Family room during March Madness

If you know me or watch my twitter, you know I’m a big basketball fan.  My love is equal to football, maybe even more so because my wife and daughter prefer basketball.  Of course, I’m a Gator and big on Billy Donovan but my Alabama readers shouldn’t close this page just yet.  My son is at Auburn, my daughter is starting at the University of Alabama this fall and I know something about Alabama’s new coach.

When Anthony Grant left Donovan’s staff to become a head coach VCU my family and I watched him there.  Grant helped Florida get to where it is so we were eager to see what he could do on his own.  Beyond the success in his own conference, beating Duke and getting knocked out in two very close NCAA games showed he could coach the game.

In high school, my daughter hung out with me and my wife a lot during the times of the oh-fours’s.   When Florida played Auburn a couple years ago, my oldest son, a freshman at the time, helped make a 3D poster of Joakim Noah for my daughter.  At the end of the game, Noah went out of his way to sign it for her.  Today, she follows the Chicago Bulls closely thanks to that game and probably knows more about the NBA and latest trades than I do. She is very serious about basketball.

The tricky part for her was late last year where my daughter became a Nation Merit Semi-Finalist.   Many schools compete for national merit finalists (which my daughter now is). While a good basketball team is secondary in picking a school, it would certainly be a nice thing to have in her case.  Plus she was already a Gator fan thanks to her dad. However, Alabama offered her one of their top scholarships and she eventually decided to go there (despite the so-so basketball tradition).  

Now, with Anthony Grant coming to the University of Alabama, we’ve ended up in a very good situation.  Alabama seems serious about becoming a real basketball school. Secondly, they have picked a coach that has been around the process of taking a Football school and making it a dual sports school. Lastly, for my family, its a coach we know and follow and respect.

Excellent work, Alabama  athletic department!  With respect to my Gator heritage and son at Auburn,  Roll Tide!

P.S. My daughter is majoring in either journalism/PR or education.  Someone in the athletic department needs to get her involved.

Zach Burhop and Billy Donovan

We had another interesting tweetup in Huntsville this month (thanks, Chris Depew for the above photo). I’m not going to try to post names of who was there since the tweetups seems to becoming increasingly virtual. I’d recommand you start tracking the #HSVTweetup tag to see who particpated.

Frank Snyder was good enough to stream the meetup over Ustream.TV which I think added a really good dimension to the tweetup.  A lot of folks joined in virtually and were able to chat with us and bring up comments.  

Dan Saterfield joined in and tried to get some technical support for his email. I tried to tell him we are a social group, not a tech group but I don’t think he believed me  I saw he got his problem fixed before the meeting was over so he may have been right.

The diversity of the group is what I’m finding most interesting. I tend to hang out with a lot of engineers and I’m guessing the marketing folks tend to hang out with other marketing folks, the PR students and recent grads tend to hang out with other PR folks and the bloggers tend to hang out with other bloggers.  The tweetup creates a more mixed group.  We are all using twitter and social media but with different perspectives, goals, and interests. Its good to see the other views.

For the next tweetup, we are talking about a new location to make it easier for folks on the other side of town (and Athens and Decatur).  Stay tuned…

I just got word from @dananLewis that the next Huntsville tweetup will be March 19 at Angel Island Coffee at 6pm.  You can track any discussion about it using the #HSVTweetup tag.

If you have not been to a tweetup before, this is a good place to start.  Angels has free Wifi and good coffee, tea and other drinks.  You can see what happened at that last Angel’s tweetup here.

Heres a link and a map to find them:

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