Inside Carolina's Origin Story

In early 2001, Inside Carolina was under new ownership. Buck Sanders had recently acquired the credentialed sports publication dedicated to covering University of North Carolina sports – which had both a print magazine and a web site – after six years under its founder. Sanders had spent the prior three years creating and growing The Tar Pit, a web site focused solely on the Tar Heel football program. Now at the helm of Inside Carolina, he was getting oriented with his new publication, determining its direction, and surveying the media landscape.

At the same time, UNCbasketball.com was in its fifth year of existence, run by Ben Sherman and a collection of volunteers, having transformed from its origins as a news blog into a home for reporting, analysis, and a large message board community — named the Top College Hoops Fan Site by ESPN several months earlier.

This is the story of how those publications came together.

Buck Sanders: In the late ‘90s, as a lark, I began to email some friends with my assessments of Carolina sports. I’d always been a follower of UNC — basketball and football – and I loved to write. The World Wide Web was becoming more and more a thing, and with the feedback I received, I was asked “Why not start a website?” Some borrowed office software and a lot of trial and error later, some volunteers, which included me, started thetarpit.com. Naturally, UNC football media and discussion were underserved relative to UNC basketball, so a football site seemed to be the path of least resistance. Also, the intricacies of football always drew me to it as a sport.

I vividly remember when one of my pieces hit a thousand views – which was over the course of a week. That made me feel that The Tar Pit was a success. Honestly, that was a lesson I never forgot. The test of every effort in our chosen field is how the people you are trying to reach respond to it. From there, everything we did grew organically, from covering recruiting, message boards, and game coverage (as much as we could without credentials).

Ben Sherman: I had a keen interest in the newspaper at a young age, furthered by several years as a neighborhood paperboy, and a passion for sports – especially Carolina Basketball. With aspirations as a sports reporter, and living hundreds of miles away from Chapel Hill, the internet provided the ideal vehicle to connect and develop those dual interests. In early 1997, a friend and I used his father’s home office computer to create an initial site by way of a free web page builder. From there I began authoring daily updates of news and commentary about Carolina Basketball. 

The community grew slowly at first, as I’d excitedly watch the site counter record a new visitor one by one, and I was on a first-name basis with many of the regular visitors. It began to grow exponentially after securing the UNCbasketball.com domain name, affiliating with a message board platform, and starting on-location reporting. But the biggest development was that the site was no longer a one-man show – the UNCbasketball.com community grew to not just a large collection of fans, but a collection of volunteer contributors. Sponsors – both individuals (Jed Dube, Martin Freedland) and small businesses (Crooks Corner, GoTickets, Pepsi-Greenville) – helped cover costs. A member of the community, Mitch Tyree, designed a T-shirt. And many stepped forward to help with coverage, including columns, postgame analysis, pickup game reports, and recruiting. When UNC offered a series of Texas-area prospects, David Thompson visited their high schools to compile interviews and photos. When there was a must-cover camp in New Jersey, Kevin Lupton joined me there to handle photos and more. When UNC pursued a guard from Seattle, John Ervin met with the player for a sit-down session. When a recruit in Minneapolis was set to announce his decision, Jason Schultz covered the event.

The game-changing volunteer was Michelle Hillison, whose experience, graphical eye, and technical know-how filled a much-needed void, and we quickly clicked. She initially offered feedback and became more involved by late 1999, before ultimately redesigning the site the following year with a professional layout and logo, and became an active, integral partner in the day-to-day operation of the site. 

UNCbasketball.com had grown far beyond my initial expectations, but at its core it was always — first and foremost — a community. This community was what made UNCbasketball.com special, and was what we were most concerned about preserving as we aimed to make the site viable for the long haul.

Michelle Hillison: I first got involved with Inside Carolina I think around 1996. I ended up giving an extra ticket to a UNC-Georgia Tech basketball game to Inside Carolina founder David Eckoff and after talking the whole game, he asked me to write for IC’s magazine.

As time went on, I enjoyed the web development and production part more (as I was doing that as a job already) and I had found myself hanging out at this site called UNCbasketball.com. I emailed the guy running it in 1999 and offered to help. Best email I ever sent. This guy Ben turned out to be a college student. We leveraged my working relationship with WRAL to borrow photos and videos.

I still remember meeting Ben in person the first time at the Carolina Brewery. I remember getting UNCb shirts made and giving him one. Such funny things you remember, it was exciting. Since we really made this from sweat and toil, things like having a brand, logo and gear were almost magical — now we were real. Oh, and we got a Post Office box, we were big time now! 

Buck: I knew about UNCbasketball.com and Ben Sherman, occasionally checking out his site. I still remember the Crooks Corner ad he had. The recruiting info and community there were impressive. Meanwhile, Inside Carolina editors Tommy Ashley and J.B. Cissell often suggested that I reach out to Ben about merging our two sites. I knew firsthand that being an independent in those days was hard. Reading Ben’s site, I could see he was wrestling with those issues as well. Joining together two sites dealing with such obstacles did not feel like a winning proposition at the time. What we had in common was that we both worked hard to cultivate a strong message board community. We had built a large and successful one at The Tar Pit, as Ben had at UNCbasketball.com.

Meanwhile, I had thought long and hard about buying Inside Carolina. Even at distress sale prices, it did not have any community of its own to speak of, I suppose because we had captured the football community as Ben had captured the basketball community. They had message boards, but they were a ghost town. We also relied on, to some extent, football recruiting. There was very little of that going on at Inside Carolina, in fact we caught them copying our info on more than one occasion and selling it to a paid “insider” recruiting service they ran. In basketball recruiting, they were getting killed by Ben.

The only real value I saw in the purchase was that due to the constraints of that era, The Tar Pit could not get press credentials — they were only given to “print” publications, and Inside Carolina had one, of sorts. In fact, I wrote for it (for free) for a time under a demanding editor named Tommy, who was a terrifying and bullying emailer. Bottom line, I knew that without press credentials, the ceiling for The Tar Pit was going to be severely limited.

At the time Inside Carolina had 250 subscribers (a good number of whom were comped), was on a schedule that was hit or miss, and whose writers wrote for free, and whose editors worked for crumbs. I am not throwing shade at Tommy or J.B., who were receiving a pittance in some sort of profit-sharing deal in which they received checks that might occasionally leverage them a Mickey D’s Happy Meal. I met with UNC once in an effort to get credentials and was told in no uncertain terms that without a print publication, no dice. Internet-only site meant no credentials. Buying Inside Carolina got us around that hurdle.

When I was completing the purchase of Inside Carolina in December of 2000, little did we know we were buying a dying business. David Eckoff, the previous owner of Inside Carolina, probably got a good laugh out of the sale. Turns out, he gave us five magic beans for a cow.

Sounds strange, but it is true. Rivals.com, our network partner at the time, was trying to land a Boeing 747 on a short runway. A casualty of the dot-com bubble burst, Rivals had a mountain of debt while depending on Internet advertising rates which were plunging. It was a company whose strategy was to build as large as it could as fast as it could, get to an IPO, and cash out. With revenues shrinking to nothing, it imploded in February of 2001, cutting off all the revenue we counted on. Thanks to an angel investor, we obtained enough funding to stay temporarily afloat and went independent. That, and a basketball recruiting call-in service, was how we survived in the short term.

Tommy Ashley: Buck hit the nail on the head when he mentioned crumbs… it’s safe to say those early days of working for Inside Carolina were a labor of love and a passion for the job. Certainly not to get rich. In fact, if I were totally honest, a used gas grill might be the golden egg from those days, but that’s a story for later.  Let me bring this back to where it started – for me at least.  It’s a story I’ve told and one I still don’t quite believe is true, even after living it.

After graduating from Carolina in 1993, getting a job, an apartment and having money to spend, I regularly spent most of that money on sports magazines. Dang near all of them. And Inside Carolina Magazine was one of those.   

IC was a favorite. The Fly on the Wall feature, the columns, articles, recruiting news, photos, all of it. So when it failed to show in my box one month, I was pissed. One evening I called customer service and soon thereafter, I received a call from a guy named David.  He certainly wanted to make sure I got what I paid for and after a few minutes of talking, he asked the question – “You seem pretty passionate about Carolina, what if I asked you to come help me at Media Day and see if you might want to work in this business?”

You are kidding, right? Well, no. No he wasn’t. So it was off to the Smith Center to help “cover” Carolina Basketball’s media day. Safe to say, that day was both amazing and quite interesting wrapped in a bit of what the heck is going on here.  David from the call was in fact owner David Eckoff and he along with a photographer named Jim Yarger and J.B. Cissell were there.

Long story short, if not for J.B., I’m not sure that wouldn’t have been my only day on the job. Not because I didn’t like the subject matter, I certainly did. But it was, simply put, weird. Those guys were an eclectic bunch. Good folks, but out of my lane in terms of personalities. And one thing was clear, the powers that be at Carolina weren’t much interested in dealing with this bunch other than the bare minimum requirements for press access.

J.B. and I bonded quickly. At the time, I’d just met the lady that would still be sitting beside me as I type this 20+ years later.  But once the IC path got rolling, I spent more time with J.B. than with her during the season, and to her credit, she didn’t object because she saw how much it meant to both of us. Ironically, she was a journalist by training and trade, but here I was covering Carolina Football and Basketball with zero background in the business, while she rode the local courthouse beat for the hometown paper. Yeah, she was a bit jealous.

J.B. and I covered every home Carolina football and basketball game and any away game we could reasonably drive to without requiring an overnight stay. Let me say this, there is a reason I despise 9 p.m. weeknight tips to this day. Those late-night covers often meant leaving the Smith Center or other gym well after midnight, only to still have an hour drive east and having to be at the paying job by 8 a.m. the next morning.  As a 20-something at the time, it was manageable, but burning the candle at both ends wore us both down.

And then you add the crumbs. Look, I’m not going to bang on the former owner of Inside Carolina. He gave me an opportunity that no one else in the world would have.  But when your paycheck is broken down into percentages of nickels and dimes, well, you get the point. Someone was getting paid, and it wasn’t us.

But Rivals was spending money like water. And to Eckoff’s credit, he let me partake a bit. First was the 2000 Final Four in Indianapolis. Carolina’s magical run meant we went with great seats – no press access for me – and all expenses paid. Later that spring, it was off to Las Vegas for the Rivals convention. They spared little expense wining and dining editors and publishers from across the network, and I have little doubt those shindigs were the beginning of the end for that company and many like it.

The used gas grill? A salvage from Eckoff’s apartment after he packed up and headed to Seattle taking a corporate job with Rivals, leaving J.B. and I to man the fort. And keeping the ship afloat just enough to be a viable entity meant covering games, publishing magazines, newsletters and, yes, stuffing all the envelopes by hand – bribing J.B. with a decent meal if he’d come down to Johnston County and do it there – labeling and stamping the product to get in the mail to those dedicated early Inside Carolina subscribers. 

Ben: I had a history with Inside Carolina that dated back to the spring of 1995, when I received my first issue of the Inside Carolina magazine. I vividly remember receiving that cover shot of a dunking and screaming Rasheed Wallace. A small note inside the issue asked for reader opinion submissions, and I promptly typed up a column on Wallace’s entry into the NBA and mailed it in. That summer, during a trip to Chapel Hill, I walked into Sutton’s Drug Store, grabbed the new issue of Inside Carolina off the rack, and found my submitted column inside. That ignited the spark. I submitted another column that ran on Inside Carolina’s web site the following year and shortly thereafter started my own web site.

Then there were my personal connections with Inside Carolina’s staff. J.B. Cissell wrote pickup game reports at UNCbasketball.com in mid-1998 before being recruited later that year to Inside Carolina and becoming an assistant editor. Despite his new role with another outlet, we communicated regularly, continuing to bond over the shared passion. On one of my trips to N.C., actually the first time we met in person, he volunteered to pick me up at the airport and let me spend the weekend at his apartment. I remember his beige Camry pulling up to the curb at RDU and the first thing he did when I stepped into the car was pop in a tape of an interview he’d recently conducted with a top UNC recruit that he was eager to share and discuss. That was J.B., both in his passion and his instant comfort level. He was so kind and genuine that there was a mutual trust almost immediately, whether sharing information or commiserating over frustrations. I never had a chat with him where I didn’t smile at least once.

J.B. also introduced me to his co-editor, Tommy, while en route to a Carolina game, and we kept in touch thereafter. Tommy had a different, more direct and serious approach, which complemented J.B well and his matter-of-fact takes on the business were smart. He had the foresight to see the potential of us working together and wasn’t shy about sharing it.

There were other Inside Carolina connections as well. Mark Simpson-Vos authored post-game analysis on our site before going to Inside Carolina in the summer of ‘99. Columnist Thad Williamson joined us in 2000 after several years with Inside Carolina. And, as previously mentioned, Michelle followed that same path as well. These connections were strong enough to persist despite my contentious relationship with the prior Inside Carolina owner, who seemed to go back and forth between recruiting me and threatening to sue me.

Tommy: J.B. and I were tight and I trusted him like a brother. So when he brought up this young guy named Ben Sherman, I listened. UNCbasketball.com was legit. With the crumbs getting short, J.B. helped me get in with Ben enough to write a few recruiting profiles for his website.

Ben impressed me on several levels but his business acumen at a relatively young age was impressive. From the early IC columns and contributions to the growing empire of UNCbasketball.com, how a kid from the Northeast managed to tap into the early trickles of the sports social media tsunami that we see today was epic. So doing side work helping J.B. along the way while holding the line for IC made sense.

Then a new player came into the mix. Not new to the game, because his Tar Pit site was a known and hardcore place for Carolina Football fans, but new to me in that I saw Buck Sanders as a potential lifeline to help J.B. and I carry the anchor that Inside Carolina was becoming in both of our lives. Passion can carry you only so far. At some point you need a financial benefit – and sleep.

When Buck began strongly considering acquiring Inside Carolina, J.B. and I met him at the old Spinnaker’s in Cary Towne Center – and while he sized us up, we did the same from across the table. Buck had a plan, laid it out and we were impressed. What he thought of the two of us, I couldn’t tell you. I’m an open book, freely letting you know what I think overtly – for better or worse – and I always thought J.B. as similar. Buck was playing chess. But we knew that we would have to be important pieces to his game and important pieces get paid. It was a no brainer to be all in for Buck if he ultimately decided to make the move.

Let me back up just a bit, not to repeat myself, but to note the thinking of J.B. and I at the time. J.B. and I busted our butts for Inside Carolina in those early years. Long hours, little sleep and those crumbs. Here you have IC in one hand and impressive Carolina sports message board and recruiting information communities in the other hand – with the ‘overlord,’ Carolina itself, controlling the strings. We had full access, but there was a constant battle for legitimacy in the arena. We showed up, worked hard, covered the teams fairly (at least J.B. and I did), and did so while receiving very little respect from the powers that be – many of whom were simply following orders from above.

We needed dudes. We needed weight behind the IC name. We had many conversations around the senselessness of having all of these ‘outsider’ sites battling each other while the University controlled the game. Why not unify? It made too much sense to us, but would it to the architects of those other sites? (Therein lay the rub, which is why J.B.’s, and to a lesser extent my, work to get this done shapes the landscape to this day.)

Once Buck Sanders made his move to buy Inside Carolina, J.B. and I knew we were halfway there. The other half? Ben Sherman and UNCbasketball.com. We got to work helping, what we believed to be a natural fit, become a reality. We knew that if this happened, Carolina would have no choice but to accept the fact that Inside Carolina was here to stay and could not be ignored any longer.

Buck: Tommy and J.B. began to like me a lot better than when we first met because, unlike David Eckoff, I paid them regularly each month – a flat amount they could count on, did not send them constant nastygrams via email, and overall treated them with the respect they deserved (Eckoff once told me after the purchase that paying writers was a bad business model). I think as a result, Tommy and J.B. began telling Ben that I was unlike Eckoff.

In March of 2001, Jim Heckman, the original founder of Rivals.com, who was either bailed out or was fired before their collapse (depending on whom you talk to) approached me with a network deal he originally called, “The Insiders.com.” Shannon Terry, who had purchased Rivals.com’s assets, also reached out to me through intermediaries. I was in no hurry to realign with a company that had just turned off the lights, so I considered Heckman’s deal (a six-month one) and our declining bank balance. I signed with TheInsiders.com.

In an instant, we off-loaded a ton of bills (bandwidth, etc.), and soon after began to receive revenues from Heckman’s new venture. We were now in the position I like best: earning more than we spent, though payroll was tiny at that point. About a month afterwards, J.B. urged me again to contact Ben, and I think he and Tommy persuaded Ben that he should talk to me. So, we did.

Ben: I felt an obligation to take the call, but I wasn’t enthused about it. And I’m sure Buck could tell I had my guard up. The prior year had affirmed and hardened my natural skepticism about surrendering control of UNCbasketball.com and its community.

I’d received a number of offers – some were to move to existing or up-and-coming team site networks, others were complete sell-offs, while a few national ventures and one local effort offered to purchase the site and then employ me. These mostly felt like opportunists rather than potential partners. In every one of these cases, it felt like the interested parties did not share our vision and in such a situation I felt I couldn’t surrender control of our community. Further souring me on this climate was what felt like a betrayal by our message board partner, who we learned negotiated a potential deal for our traffic with a network behind our backs, leaving us no choice but to depart overnight and work toward creating our own message board.

The primary reason I agreed to speak to Buck was because of my relationship with, and the urgings from, J.B. and Tommy. I don’t remember the specifics of that initial call with Buck, but I do remember that I was skeptical of anyone interested in obtaining our site, skeptical of the team site networks, skeptical of the subscription model, and skeptical I could preserve the community. That’s not the foundation for a productive initial phone call.

Buck: That first conversation was awkward. Subsequently I learned that other media folks had been trying to purchase UNCbasketball.com for some time. But at the time, the number of viable partners in our business was slim. The entire Internet had just crashed, or at least, Internet advertising had. In any event, I told Ben about Heckman’s plan for a subscriber part of the business to roll out some time in August. Ben was skeptical, to put it mildly. As I say, it was awkward. I had no expectation anything would come of it. Except, I think I did score some points with Ben when I discussed press credentials and that without them our value would always be limited. Still, I was not optimistic, and neither was Ben.

Ben: So, with Michelle’s help, I pursued furthering the independent route for UNCbasketball.com, exploring more powerful servers to handle the spiking traffic, and pursuing larger advertising options to cover the cost of the rapidly growing server bills, all while trying to expand the site’s coverage. That was a tough path and it took me a couple months to fully come to terms with just how tough it would be.

An attempt at a network co-op, to combine a handful of large independent sites to improve an advertising deal, didn’t materialize. The cratered ad market necessitated a “please click the ads” campaign to our readers and, while vitally helpful in the short term, was not a long-term financial solution, so we then resorted to posting pleas to our readership for help in finding sponsors. We also received a couple more pitches from team site networks, but those prospects weren’t any more appealing than in the months prior.

Meanwhile, we had a legal obstacle hanging over our heads. The College Licensing Company, on behalf of the University, was firmly protesting our use of “UNC” in the name and web address of the site, demanding we change the name and relinquish the URL. And from a coverage standpoint, we wanted to improve our reporting on the Carolina team, but – similar to the experience Buck noted with his site – the school was not willing to issue us a press credential, providing a fluid explanation that ranged from our lack of a print publication to the presence of our message boards. Lastly, I was approaching a personal crossroads, with the need to figure out a post-college career path.

With the financial, legal and personal questions constantly on my mind, J.B. and Tommy continued to make their case for a merger with Inside Carolina. The three of us had conversations over many months, sometimes serious and sometimes more like wishful thinking, about potentially teaming up in various capacities. And we had found ways to work together (when their prior boss allowed), such as an arrangement the prior season where they’d send UNCbasketball.com a photo from each game in exchange for our promotion of Inside Carolina’s game coverage.

There was certainly still some skepticism of a potential merger, but whether or not Buck knew the full extent of it, I was becoming more open to the idea.

Buck: I reached back out and detailed why I thought it was worth revisiting the merger. When Ben questioned how the whole subscriber deal would work out, I confessed that I did not have all those answers but could see its potential. He had been hired as the editor of “The ACC Basketball Handbook,” and was working in Charlotte that summer. We determined a time and place to meet the very next day, at a raw bar in Matthews. I confess I did not go into that meeting with great expectations. Looking back, I saw Ben as cautious, just out of his teens, who through his previous experiences viewed every potential partner as the Giant atop the beanstalk. Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum.

Going into the meeting, I’ll also confess I did not view it as a make-or-break deal. Tommy and J.B. had me convinced it was a deal that made a lot of sense, and I could see it. From Ben’s perspective, I can see how he came into the meeting expecting the hard sell, but that is not how I viewed it. I was making zero dollars with Inside Carolina, and if it folded entirely it was not going to redefine my circumstances. If we could work something out, great. If not, my life wasn’t going to change. The point being, I was in a relaxed state of mind going into the meeting.

Ten minutes or less into the meeting, whatever awkwardness that preceded it was gone. It is probably an exaggeration to say this, or maybe I am just remembering it fondly because of this occasion, but to me there was a level of trust established early during that meeting that is impossible to explain. I was a 49-year-old who had a demanding day job for which I was reasonably compensated. Ben was a college junior, someone I viewed as a brash Bostonian, another emailer with brusque manners, suspicious that anyone that approached him with a deal was trying to rob him of his cow. The way I remember it, those feelings, to the extent I describe them accurately, were gone in minutes. We engaged in a little small talk first (neither of us are especially good at it), but basically got straight to business, already feeling the beginnings of a level of trust with each other which grew throughout the meeting. Never underestimate the value of a face-to-face meeting, or as Ben and I have come to call it, a “sit-down.” It has worked well for us and for Inside Carolina.

As we got into the specifics of the deal, we mutually decided on things, working out the details on bar napkins – not kidding. That took no time. It was a deal that made perfect sense. We then began to talk about what was next. In that context, Ben asked me what I thought might be the ceiling for the number of subscribers we could get, someday, the upper limit. I said, maybe 1,500, and he agreed. We were off on that number. By a lot.

We left Matthews with a deal in place. Or, at least, that’s the way I felt.

Ben: I’m sure meeting face to face helped, but I think we were both in a different mindset than our prior conversation, both more relaxed, flexible and willing to make it work. I got that sense immediately. What was most evident to me was that, despite our very different ages, backgrounds, and personalities, this wasn’t an opportunist sitting across from me – like so many others that I’d heard from – or someone trying to throw money and big promises at me. This was someone that I could trust, that shared the passion, values and vision to work together, preserve the community, and build a professional publication for the long haul.

I remember we sat on bar stools at a back table at this oyster bar and got right to it, first talking big picture, then getting into the numbers. I’m sure I brought my notepad, and yet we were doing math on napkins, calculating how we’d divide aspects of the business and what it’d take to reach financial viability for all involved.

My feeling walking out of the bar was that we had a good verbal agreement, and that I had a lot of calls to make.

Ben: I had a lengthy phone conversation and many emails with Michelle that night. I reached out to J.B. and Tommy. I remember contacting Thad, and also seeking advice from Kevin and Clint Jackson, who were friends and contributors to the site’s recruiting coverage. They all provided valuable feedback, and suggested some aspects I hadn’t previously considered, but none thought it was a bad idea. I had their support, which was what I needed in order to move forward. The next day I let Buck know that I was on board and we began to plan for the merger. The date was set for July 14.

In hindsight, getting everything ready in less than three weeks was a reach – especially since I was simultaneously dealing with ACC Handbook deadlines. I don’t remember being overwhelmed, but rather excited. There was so much to do, all of which had to happen behind the scenes. We had to essentially prepare to close UNCbasketball.com, and I spent countless hours writing and rewriting the announcement that was to replace the front page of the site. The to-do list included merging staffs and determining roles, preparing to on-board the massive message board community, learning the new publishing tools and moving as much content over as we could, and preparing a new logo and other graphics and formatting. And there was ironing out the fine print of the agreement for the merger itself and all the financial and legal details of that. At the same time we wanted to proceed publicly as though it was business as usual, continuing our summer recruiting event coverage for the site, with scheduled trips for me to D.C, New Jersey, and Georgia on the docket.

I spent the last few days leading up to the merger date covering the Peach Jam in North Augusta, while juggling the final checklist, and then on July 13 drove straight to Michelle’s for a 24-hour merger marathon. Her house was going to be merger HQ.

Michelle: It was messy to start – a lot of people with different plans on how to do things but first we had to move all of our stories manually to a content management tool that The Insiders, the network Inside Carolina was already on, used.

It was a strange feeling, giving up what made us “us.” We loved having a templated page to fill story stuff in, we were still doing so much manually at UNCb even though we did have a small content management system running. But using The Insiders’s tools meant losing flexibility and a unique look. For years, we hoarded this small gray box on the front of the site that I could hard code stuff in. A network partner meant things wouldn’t break as much, a lot less human errors and stability. I’m no network admin and running our old UNCb board software was a huge pull on our servers and really getting over my head – I remember dealing with the crashes.

My husband and I had just built a house in Cary, we had space and a good internet connection with a splitter. So Ben took one end of my living room sectional and I took the other, while we moved content over and prepped for the public news. No wifi, we had long cords to the internet connection and laptops on lap desks. Hours and hours, it was brutal. My husband would go get us food and we’d eat while plugging away. I distinctly remember drinking straight from a two liter of Mountain Dew at one point. Sadly it was not the last all-nighter I’d pull with Ben working on IC stuff, in fact I’d wager it was the only all-nighter we pulled that was sort of fun.

Ben and Buck asked me to create a new logo and then a graphic combining them. I still have all the variations. Different colors, different locations.

Ben: The memory of that all-nighter is mostly a blur of moving over files, setting up accounts, getting oriented with new message board software, and preparing – if not bracing – to flip UNCbasketball.com to its farewell letter and direct everyone over to Inside Carolina. Most important to me was the reaction from the readership; whether they’d understand my decision and embrace the new site. While there were select ugly reactions that certainly stung to read, the overall response to the change was overwhelmingly positive. I cherished the emails that I got from long time readers offering congratulations and notes of appreciation. That response gave me further confidence that this was the right move and that the UNCbasketball.com community would endure.

Buck: The site traffic moved over quickly, but we had to integrate, on the fly, the UNCbasketball.com community into Inside Carolina, which already had an intact football community. With premium subscriptions being offered in essentially a month’s time, integration of UNCbasketball.com into Inside Carolina was essential. Time was of the essence.

This is where Michelle, who can affectionately be called the Mother of Inside Carolina on a lot of levels, stepped into the fray. For whatever reasons, which we could take time to delineate, there are segments of the UNC basketball and football community that don’t get along. That dislike, or whatever you want to call it – tension – still exists, though to a lesser extent. Putting the two communities together was a Herculean task, managed by Michelle with Ben’s help. Michelle, whose limitless patience, forbearance, and ability to surmount thorny issues is heroic, helped us through this time with her usual aplomb.

Michelle: The funny thing about that tension was some folks viewed Ben and I as just basketball people – as a fourth generation Chapel Hillian, I absolutely loved Carolina football too. That’s hard to prove on a message board and it was clear the two “tribes” had a different feel. But what we wanted to make sure people knew was there would be some standard rules that apply to all and this would be handled professionally. We went through some moderators, and some contributors went by the wayside, as we found our new normal.

Buck: The timing was critical. To maximize the initial sale of subscriptions, we needed to bring the two communities together. There were commonalties. Ben and I both discouraged profanity, trolling, and extraneous political and religious distractions on our message boards before the merger, preferring to attempt to keep our communities focused on basketball and football topics. We saw eye-to-eye on message board interactions. Not to say there were not difficulties, but with Michelle and Ben on the job, we got through it, as the August deadline approached. 

Then, a month after the merger, subscriptions with TheInsiders.com network went on sale. Within 24 hours, we were nearing the total Ben and I supposed might be the ceiling after many years of work.

We climbed down the beanstalk with the Giant’s golden harp in hand.

 ***

After merging on July 14, 2001, Inside Carolina began selling online subscriptions on Aug. 13 and immediately led the network in total subscribers. For the last two-plus decades, Inside Carolina has continued to lead its network (first TheInsiders/Scout, then 247Sports, then On3), while growing into a group of eight full-time staffers and more than a dozen regular contributors.