Welcome To My New Avalanche Experiment

Why I decided to move to Substack, and what you can expect from me moving forward

Dec 29, 2022

Man, I haven’t been this nervous in quite a while. This is my first post on this new platform, and despite 33 years of sports writing experience and seven books to my credit, I feel like I’m writing my first thing ever right now. Like, ever.

A lot of you already know me and my backstory, but for any who don’t, let me give you a quick thumbnail bio: My name is Adrian Dater. I moved to Denver from New Hampshire in 1991, on a pure wing and a prayer, with no job, no car and one friend who also lived here. I’ve been here ever since. About four years after leaving N.H., where I was living in my parent’s basement while toiling as a proofreader and occasional sports writer, I somehow was riding on the team plane of a new team in town called the Colorado Avalanche. After communing with spiders and cobwebs down in that basement, suddenly I was talking hockey on the plane with guys like Joe Sakic, Patrick Roy and Peter Forsberg, and chronicling it all for The Denver Post. Don’t ask me how that all happened.

I have a wife, a son and a dog. I live in a house in Thornton. All of us are going through some transitions right now, and it hasn’t been easy. My wife, Heidi, is the rockstar of the family. We’ve been married for almost 22 years. Without her, I’d be in big trouble. My son, Tommy, is 18 and…yeah, he’s 18. A tough age. Still trying to figure out what he wants to do in life. My dog, a Yorkie named Rhoda, is about 12 years old now. She walks in as much now pain as I do, it seems.

Me? I’ve had a hard week. Very hard. A few days ago, I actually resigned from the site I basically started myself in 2019. It was called Colorado Hockey Now, and it was a success. The subscriber numbers were, by far, the highest of any of the sites in the “Hockey Now” network, and the average traffic per month was higher than some sites that cover all sports in town. We only covered one team, the Colorado Avalanche.

I was super scared at starting my own site in 2019, after all those years of having a guaranteed paycheck. It was hard to put aside the fear and actually do it. But, to my astonishment, the subscribers started pouring in. I still get emotional just thinking about it. Those first couple of years at CHN were some of the happiest of my life.

I can actually work for myself now, not some Big Media company with layers and layers of management, all telling you what to do, how to behave, etc. etc.

It was liberating, it was exhilarating. I started to make more money than I ever did at my previous places of employment. Well, maybe not for a couple years - 2011 through 2013, when I was a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated’s website (and one, count ‘em one, print story). With my Post salary and SI money coming in, I was making some pretty damn good money. Then, those two entities basically went to shit, and so did I.

I got very depressed, started getting some bad habits (too much booze, too much dependence on sleeping pills, not treating an underlying problem of OCD anxiety with better remedies), and lost the gig at the Post over a bad social media post in late 2014. I was not in my right mind at all when I made it, but it happened and I have to own it. It’s a shameful part of my past, and I really wish it never happened.

But we all know the saying: sometimes, the worst things you think can happen to you turn out to be the best. I got some needed professional help. I was as low as one could be, or at least for me I was, but I started to work my way out of it. I did some substitute teaching in a tough, poor school district. It was really hard, but I think I was pretty good at it, judging by some of the feedback and connections with kids I had. The teaching gig was good for me. It got me out of my “sports writer” bubble and put me back into real life. But the pay was low, and there were days when the kids just walked all over me.

In late 2015, I got a good job offer at Bleacher Report, with a good salary, as their NHL “columnist at large.” I was like, ‘have you googled my name lately?” They said they had, and said something I’ll never forget: “The Denver Post’s loss will be our gain.”

Wow. That was amazing. Bleacher Report changed their business model a couple of years later and did away with writers like me, but no hard feelings. I remain grateful to them to this day for rescuing me from the scrap heap.

I landed at BSN Denver, and worked hard for them, a fledgling entity. I helped get them off to a great start when they switched to a paywall site. But, there were too many issues there for me to stay and so I resigned. I do remain grateful to them for giving me a chance there too.

That led to me starting Colorado Hockey Now, and it succeeded. So, now for the answer to what I’m sure you’re wondering: why did you quit, Dater?

Well, I said the other day it was over “creative differences.” But, didn’t you run the whole kit and caboodle over there, Dater? Almost, but not quite.

I was like a McDonald’s franchisee. I got the tools and infrastructure to start the site from the couple guys who started the “Hockey Now” operation. I ran the site, was the main writer and editor and kept most of the money that came in. But I always had to kick some back to corporate, which was fine.
But after a while, my interactions with “corporate” became more strained. That’s really all I want to say about that, because there’s no use in getting too specific and airing dirty laundry.

I, too, remain grateful to the couple of guys who started the Hockey Now sites, and I wish them the best moving forward.

So, here I am today, Dec. 29, 2022, trying to start over (again) on the platform Substack.

My goals for this site carry one big, overarching desire: To stop feeling like a hamster on a wheel and start taking my time a bit more and really writing the way I know I can. I have been through a lot in my life, so one of the things I’d love to do - no matter now unrealistic it may sound - is to give some life advice to my readers out there, especially the younger ones.

From living on a hippie commune in Vermont as a kid in the early 1970s, with fugitives from the FBI living under my same roof and lots of homemade baked bread, to being part of big media corporations, to all kinds of personal and professional problems in between, I think I can talk to most of you about what you’re going through. I want to really write about the Avalanche in a more cerebral way again. Yeah, I know it’s not rocket science either way. But I can tell better stories when I have a chance to breathe. I don’t want to just be a harried stenographer like I felt I was becoming again at CHN. In other words, I don’t want to waste as many calories detailing the latest promotions and demotions by the Avs with the Eagles. I don’t want to burn as many calories on who is starting the game at left wing on the third line instead of the second line.

Yeah, knowing me, I’ll still want to post all that kind of information really fast. It may not always be right here on this site, but any quick personnel decisions, I’ll still post it on my twitter feed, and probably here too.

But at CHN, the expectations were to write 4-6 stories every day, with kind of a clickbait headline formula. I don’t want to do clickbait. I want just good, solid writing on the Avalanche and hockey in general.

I want to do more podcasts and more video analysis. I will also bring on a very, very good writer to this site. His name is Pat Salvas, and he did work for me at CHN that was very well received. He is a former sports information director at Dartmouth College who just happens to be a lifelong, rabid Avs fan, who can really write.

Now, about payment and support of the site. The “money” talk.

This will be my final stop. I have asked for your financial support before, at BSN and CHN. The response was tremendous. But I never had full, full, full control of things in the end. I’m sorry to have to do this again. But this will absolutely be for the last time. About the price, too: Subtack has kind of a minimum amount they think works best for everybody, and that’s $50 for a full year, at $4.16 a month, or a monthly, no contract rate of $5 a month. That’s a little more than I asked at CHN, but, hey, lots of people told me I was charging too little - especially compared to my competition in the marketplace.

I’m a cheap SOB, so I worry about the price point here. All I can say is, I’ll write the way I really like to, with a little more time to think. I have a LOT of stories about the Avalanche and their history, but I always want to be forward-thinking. This won’t be a place where I just tell a lot of old war stories. I want to report and analyze on the current Avalanche team, not past ones.

On this platform, it’s just me. Nobody above me, no corporate overlord who wants to turn this into a clickbait farm. I get 90% of every dollar that comes in. Substack gets 10%. So, while technically there is still someone else who gets some money, there is nobody that I have to answer to in human, physical form.

This site has a lot of great writers who left “mainstream” media and have had great success with it. I hope to be another. I want to think of myself as a gentleman farmer, who puts out the best crops he can and hope the market gives me a good price for them. It’s down to just you and me, dear reader. I hope I can make the money spent feel like a bargain. If not, there’s an easy “cancel” button.

The site has a lot of great features to make things look interesting, and I’m still playing around with them. So, be a little patient with me on the look of things. The logo I have now? That might change too, but it’s something I can work with for now, and a shoutout to Tony Caya for doing it for me on short notice.

I hope you’ll come along with me, Avalanche fans. We've been through a lot together already. This picture below is proof. The subscribe button is just below that.