Lax All Stars Weekend Update
As many of you know, our goal at Lacrosse All Stars is and always has been to grow the game. That phrase is the only reason I bought the domain LacrosseAllStars.com back in 2003 for the first ever Idaho High School Lacrosse All-Star Game, and it continues to be the only reason we operate and strive to build LAS today.
Spreading The Word
LAS was not established with many other goals in mind. That’s why we’ve always pushed to try to get you involved. Whether it’s photos, video, guest posts or weekly series like Cajun’s Corner, we want to help you and your team share your own story and spread the love of the game to new realms.
Complimenting that same notion, we’ve decided to begin sharing our story a bit more often with you guys. We’re going to give you a better look at what we’re working on behind the scenes. After all, what’s a french fry joint without knowing where the fries come from?
Over the past several months, the LAS staff has had the gears turning offline. In addition to planning out content, upgrading our technology stack (secret server stuff that only KMac knows how to explain) and charting our growth strategy, two of us have actually left our jobs to pursue LAS full time. We’ve jumped in head first and committed to our vision 100%. Now, we are working even more diligently to make it all happen.
The 502/504 Boys
Part of the information above, the secret server stuff, deserves to be addressed in its own section. Many of you probably noticed that over the past few weeks our sites have been up and down sporadically. You’ve probably encountered 502 or 504 errors more than once. For that, we apologize.
Today I’m happy to report that the issue that was causing those errors has been found, tied down and strangled to death. You should not run into any more road blocks, and there’s more positives that came from those few erroneous weeks than negative — The site is now much faster, and we’ve upgraded to a structure that will allow us to grow our network at a quicker rate.
And you know what the best part of that whole ordeal was? People helping people. As soon as the errors started happening, Mario from VPSbuddy.com and Loyal Reader Dan Willson reached out and volunteered to help. We could not be more appreciative of their willingness to help us get things under control. Thanks guys!
The Road Ahead
If you’ve followed our sites this week – LaxAllStars.com in particular – you may have noticed a slight increase in coverage. This is only the beginning. We plan to bring you more content, more often. Plain and simple.
To date, the Lax All Stars Network has 6 sites running on it: LAS, 412, MCLA Fan, Sweet Sweet Lax, The Spoon Feed and Drodarb Sports. We hope to expand our network even more over the next few months.
But beyond bringing you content, we also want to enable you to easily contribute your own. I can’t stress enough that we want to help people and programs tell their own stories to the LAS audience. This is a forum for YOU. That’s why we’re going to make it really easy to do so over the next few weeks.
In addition to getting readers more involved and expanding our network, we’re also working on some fundraising ideas to help lacrosse programs out. The first of which is a t-shirt campaign and you can email me for more information.
And speaking of t-shirts, we plan to continue hooking up loyal readers on our Limited Edition list, which is going to turn into a monthly newsletter with cool gear, great deals and top content next month.
Finally, we’re getting a few advertisers on board to help pay for server costs, get us to events all lacrosse America and put a little food on the table. But, and this is a BIG BUT, as we do this we do not want to overwhelm anyone or give you guys some random ad on the site that’s uninteresting and irrelevant. So, we’d like to open the floor for input. Are there any companies you think we should partner with? Please drop their name in the comments section below.
Finally Finally
If you want us to cover something special next week, let us know. We’ll do it in a heartbeat. Just drop a line in the comments section below or send us a tip!
For LAS Weekend Update I’m Jeff Brunelle! Good night!
