By Jim den Hollander

Editor/Publisher

Orilliasports.ca

This is going to be a quick turnaround.

I am 63 and more or less retired. I have worked in sports since leaving (yeah, not graduating. Way too much fun in college) from Loyalist College, near Belleville, ON in 1983.

I have worked in sports at various publications since then, in Trenton, Barrie, Milton, Port Hope and Cobourg before moving to the USA and working as sports editor of a small publication for another 15 years.

I returned to Ontario and the Orillia area recently and my interest and love of small town sports has returned. Romanticizing times at the local ball park in Port Hope led me to check out a couple of rep teams in the past week or so — the U18 Ellwood Epps team at Ross Diamond and the U22 Wes Brennan Construction Juniors at Udell Diamond.

Both diamonds have character, in particular Udell right on the beach and both teams looked good on that particular night. Since then I have decided to try my luck at a blog type website with information on all sports.

This week, after traveling to Victoria Harbor to watch a U7 softball game I stopped at Rotary Park and discovered a competitve girls lacrosse game — now that was a first and a sport I want to see and learn more about as well.

Earlier, spent time at the local ball hockey facilities both on 15th line and Warminster. Through the winter months I spent time at the Rotary Arena, mostly watching the junior Terriers.

Clearly, Orillia is a great sports town and the faciities here are amazing. I am already in love with this community and people here clearly believe sports are very important.

The one area I haven’t dug into deeply yet is high school and college sports. I am hoping to have this site up in some capacity on July 1 but I think the rest of the summer will be mostly exploration and meeting people before the varsity and junior hockey teams step up in the fall as well.

My goal is to find a way to include everything in here that I can from the top level teams to house leagues to local fun sports like slowpitch, bowling, pickleball, whatever is out there.

The scope is overwhelming and I will be hoping for help from others to get my site off the ground.

If you are a local sports organizer or publicity person, I hope to be in contact with you in the near future. I am scrambling a bit to get myself photography/video equipment so for now it will likely be pics and hopefully interviews off my phone.

I hope it works out.