Welcome to Seth Davis Writes Again

Today I launch my Substack newsletter. College basketball, sports, meditation, storytelling -- whatever I feel like writing, whatever you feel like reading.

When I was a sophomore in high school at The Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, we had an elite bucket getter on our girls’ basketball team named Julianne Rolapp. Her hair was short, her teeth had braces, and her jump shot was pure butter. I had done some writing for our school newspaper, but somehow I got the idea to pitch a feature on Julianne to our local paper, the Montgomery County Sentinel. They told me to go for it. I interviewed Julianne as well as her coach, Jim McGuire. My story started with a horrific cliché about McGuire’s face lighting up “like a Christmas tree” upon the mention of Julianne’s name, but I got the thing published under my byline. It was a thrill.

Nearly 40 years later, it is still thrilling to see my byline under a story or book that I’ve gotten published. That remains true on this day as I launch my newsletter on Substack.

To acknowledge the obvious, I did arrive at this point on my own volition. My writer’s journey took me from The Bullis Bulldog and Mongtomery County Sentinel to The Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke. After graduation, I spent two-and-a-half years covering high school sports for The New Haven Register in Connecticut. My big break came at the age of 25, when I got hired to be a fact checker at Sports Illustrated. Writing for SI was all I wanted to do growing up. The fact that I did it for 22 years still blows me away.

The media business has not been pretty of late, and I have been on the business end of the business multiple times. In the spring of 2017, I was informed by one of the top editors at SI that I was being let go. In May of 2023, I was informed by The Athletic that my contract was not being renewed. And last week, I was informed by an anonymous leaker to the New York Times that The Messenger was shutting down. (It would have been nice to have been informed by the company itself, but that’s a story for another day.) If you’re scoring at home, that’s three roster cuts in seven years. If that’s not a record, it’s got to be on the leaderboard.

Yet here I am, still writing, and I gotta tell you I am pumped. I’m not just writing now, I’m building a new community. For those who have followed and supported my work in the past, I hope you will continue to follow and support me here. You will get the same things you’ve always gotten from me on the college basketball beat – inside reporting, analysis, opinion writing, longform storytelling. You’ll get my weekly top 25 rankings (which are always correct), game picks against the spread (which are not always correct), plus news and nuggets from all around the sport. I will pay special attention to the massive disruptions vis a vis the NIL, the transfer portal, and the rapid professionalization of college sports. I’ll continue to lean heavily into my ability to get access to people you want to hear from and write what they tell me. I already have a long list of story ideas, and I’m ready to get to work.

Losing a job sucks, but at least the timing is good. Once the Super Bowl ends Sunday night, college hoops will take center stage. And we are ready for our close-up.

But I’m also going to use this forum to delve into other topics that interest me. For example, I plan to do a good deal of writing about mental health and meditation. I keep hearing that the world is so mean and divisive, but I don’t believe that to be true. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you know that I start each morning by posting the phrase “Please Be Kind.” It’s a reminder to myself as well as to my followers that we really do have choices as to how we want to think, feel, and treat each other. So in my own small way, I hope to use my writing ability to help people be a little less mean and a little less sad. We’re only here for a little while, after all, and we only have each other.

Mostly what I want to do is what I’ve always done – tell stories. I enjoy watching games and keeping scores, but what I love most about sports is the way it reveals our common humanity. I am incredibly lucky to have an amazing broadcasting gig with CBS Sports, but in my heart, and in my bones, I will always consider myself first and foremost a writer. After all these decades, there’s still nothing better than grinding at the keyboard and seeing what comes. It is hard work and pure joy.

So I invite you to join me as I set off on this new chapter. I’ll be soliciting your feedback as to what I should be writing about, and I look forward to the engagement. Think of this as your forum, too. I hope you will give me a little of your time, and perhaps a few of your dollars, so I can continue bringing you the kinds of stories that will entertain you, inform you, and hopefully move you to be a little more kind, to yourselves as well as others.

The ball is tipped.