Friends: The Ones You Make Earlier in Life May Help You Later

When I attended Florida State University in the early-1990s, I wrote for the FSView school newspaper.  I originally started out as the student government writer, but then worked my way up to features editor.  For my last semester in Fall 1994, I was the sports editor and even had a sports talk radio show five nights a week on WTAL 1450 AM.

I worked with a lot of great people, many who have gone on to do some amazing things. Sports Editor Manny Diaz is now the defensive coordinator with the Mississippi State Bulldogs.  Photo Editor Lance Rothstein worked for many years with the St. Petersburg Times and now resides in Belgium.  Melanie McCullough went to work for Duke University and then the V Foundation before finding happiness as the Director of Communications for a church in Chapel Hill.

However, this blog entry is about one person in particular - then-Sports Writer Mike Avila.

Mike and I hit it off immediately.  We had great sports discussions and wrote a lot of side-by-side pieces where he expressed one opinion and I expressed another.  One particular memory I have is getting Mike a press pass to interview then-WCW World Champion and FSU football legend Ron Simmons before a match at the Leon County Civic Center in Tallahassee.  Simmons totally broke character for the interview and Mike asked him excellent questions, including what it was like to be the first-ever African-American World Heavyweight Wrestling Chamion.

After graduation, Mike and I lost touch; through the years, I looked him up many times.  Unfortunately, Mike Avila is a very common name and I never did locate him.

That all changed with Bobby Bowden's retirement.  On December 2, the day after the retirement, I managed to stage an event on Twitter that included about 50-75 others who changed their avatar for 24 hours to Bobby Bowden.  Gators, Hurricanes, LSU Tigers and Seminoles all participated in #Bobbyfor24. 

One of the people who participated that day was a person on Twitter named @MikeAvila. When I reach out to him, we immediately realized who each of us was - after 15 long years, I had finally found Mike.  It was no surprise to me that Mike has gone on to become a successful writer/producer/contributor for many news organizations in New York.

As 2010 moved along, Mike and I communicated often on Twitter.  Finally, on April 16 (my dad's birthday), Mike friended me on Facebook.  When I confirmed him, it said he had one mutual friend.  I naturally thought it was someone we wrote with at FSView.  However, to my surprise, it was a friend of mine from South Florida that I met through Twitter almost a year ago: @JoseBoza.

Jose and I are both in Public Relations and would often talk to each other at events about PR and other communications-related topics.  Not once did we ever talk about sports, though.

When I noticed Jose was the mutual friend of Mike and me, I was curious.  So on Saturday, April 17, I called Jose up to talk.  I found out that he and Mike went to Coral Park High School together and he was a year or two behind Mike's class.  At that point, I explained to Jose about how I knew Mike and that Mike and I were huge sports fans.

That led Jose to mention he had wanted to talk to me for a while because he could tell from my Facebook and Twitter posts that I was a big sports fan.  He mentioned he had thought about starting a blog/website for a long time that dealt with social media and sports in a way not yet being done.  The second he said it, my ears perked up and I began agreeing with him.  He said he thought I would make a great partner on this venture.

After adding my good friend Jarret Streiner AKA @jarret23 (who I have known since high school and reconnected with a few years ago via a client event) to the team as our web designer, we went through some names until Jarret came up with "Pitch to the Rhino."  It plays off the children's riddle, "What do you do to an elephant with three balls? You walk him and PITCH TO THE RHINO!"

One month to the day of my first conversation with Jose, we launched the site on Monday, May 17.  It has been a fun project so far thanks to the support of so many on Facebook and Twitter, and one that keeps this old sportswriter-at-heart involved in sports

Had I not been such good friends with Mike back in the day and had Mike not friended me on Facebook, none of this may have ever happened.  Thanks, Mike!