As you probably know by now, our friend Eric in Madison officially announced he was stepping down as the Site Manager of Canis Hoopus yesterday.

Despite being a part-time writer, I truly cannot find the words to appropriately thank Eric (as well as my guy John Meyer) for everything they have done since welcoming me to the Canis team back in the summer of 2016.

There’s an enormous amount of time and effort put into running a site like Canis Hoopus. None of this happens with the snap of your fingers or the click of a button. The recruiting, training, mentoring, editing, brainstorming, and monitoring is the background activity that happens every single day— the list of responsibilities can seem endless at times, and that’s on top of trying to carve out enough minutes or hours to create and publish one’s own work. And yet, whenever I needed Eric or John, they were always available. They were there to provide guidance, or an extra pair of eyes, or just a safe space to vent about real life issues that rarely find their way onto these pages.

So again, on behalf of myself, Mike, Jake, the Wolvescast crew, the Lynx team, and Canis Family at large, I want to send out one more official THANK YOU to my two good friends, Eric and John.

“Tell us a little bit about yourself.”

It seems odd to introduce myself since I’ve been around Canis for years now, but like many of you, I find myself with extra free time these days, so here goes nothing...

I joined Canis four years ago because I wanted a sense of belonging like Eric marvelously wrote about in his farewell. Zach Lowe wasn’t the goal, nor were hopes of gaining more Twitter followers. I was simply searching for a sense of belonging.

I had just moved away from my home state of North Dakota to the West Coast. Being someone who already suffers from heightened anxiety, I felt especially lost, lonely, and detached from many of the things that made me feel happy — friends, family, and sports. Writing has always been naturally therapeutic for me, so I figured it was worth a shot to mix something healthy (writing) with something rather unhealthy (being a lifelong Minnesota Timberwolves fan).

What I’ve learned since joining Canis is that writing gives me purpose, and that feeling is wonderful, but it’s the connections and friendships I’ve formed along the way that have truly made me feel whole. This place is unlike any other, even if it will always, at least broadly, be a website that covers the Timberwolves.

In actuality, this is a platform for anyone to discuss anything, whether it be recipes, statistics, pop culture, mental health, politics, etc. — the same topics members of any neighborhood or community would prioritize.

When my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer last summer, this community helped keep my spirits up and my mind as clear as it could be. Canis gave me the strength I needed to be there for my family. My mom’s in remission now, but I’ll never forget the total strangers, many of whom navigate these comment section waters on a daily basis, that reached out to me to share their stories, their resources, or their advice to help get me through one of the darkest times of my life.

So yeah, Canis Hoopus may be a basketball site, but for a lot of us it’s so much more than that — it’s a community for us to come and share our stories, our struggles, our successes, and the happiness and failures in our lives.

We’re all here.

Going forward, things will run very similarly to how they have in the past with some slight tweaks here and there. When I signed up for this challenge years ago, I was asked to provide daily Wolves-related #kahntent. In order to do so, I will need to bring on more writers — both male and female — to bolster an already strong collection of contributors. It may take a little time (having live sports to talk about again wouldn’t hurt either), but my promise to you the reader is to continue to build upon the great foundation that Eric and John built over the years.

I believe it was an 18th century poet (or perhaps a recently acquired All-Star point guard) who once famously stated, “We’re gonna need ya’ll support. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re excited, so let’s keep that shit going.”

Go Wolves.