I could tell you how much work went into bringing this website to fruition, but I'll leave that to the guy above who did the heavy lifting.

I also could tell you about my mentors, especially the one who got me into the news gathering business and gave me a job writing about sports -- technically not a license to steal, but the next best thing to it -- but he's in the column to the left of me with his own tale to tell.

Instead, I want to talk about you.

This site is dedicated to you -- the reader.  Whether you are an athlete, family member, fan, supporter or all of the aforementioned, we developed this site with you in mind. We have feature stories, game stories, schedules and standings already in the system for your perusal. We will be adding more content over the next few weeks.

Here's the thing. While we are veteran news gatherers in the traditional sense, we are new to this website stuff. We have some great young, enthusiastic minds that actually grasp how to display and manage content and can help us old codgers from messing it up too much.

But we need your help.

We need to know what you like and what you don't like, and perhaps most importantly, what more you may like to see on the site (within reason, you of the raging hormonal set).

You are why we are here.

The enthusiasm that has greeted this project has been overwhelming. Through word of mouth, Twitter and/or Facebook, you found our wordpress site (metrosportsreport.wordpress.com) this fall when we were "practicing" for this day. You gave us numbers we could show potential advertisers and -- most importantly -- a belief that this project could succeed.

Let me give you an idea of how those numbers have increased.  We started the last weekend in August, when the prep football season began, and we got 306 hits in a few days. The numbers were steady in September (2,911) and October (3,285). In November, we more than doubled our previous month with 6,700 hits and in December we again more than doubled our hits with 14,858.

I could be a crazy man and extrapolate those numbers and say that by July 2012 we'll have every member of the planet hitting on our site, but that would be ludicrous, unless Bill Gates gives a computer to everyone. Even then, Marcus Paige, Kiah Stokes and Christian French have some appeal across the country, but the across the globe? Doubtful.

That's the beauty of this thing. We're not for everyone, although many of our feature stories appeal to more than just sports fans.

We're for you.

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