The Origin Story
Like a lot of Kentucky kids, my love for Kentucky sports started long before I could really fully grasp what being a Kentucky fan meant.
It started with my grandfather.
My grandfather was the person who introduced me to Kentucky basketball and football. We watched everything together. During the season, we watched the games with my mom. During the summer, when there weren't any games to watch, we would pull out old VHS tapes of games that he had recorded and watch those instead. I can't tell you how many times I've seen Kentucky cut down the nets in San Antonio. Kentucky sports were simply part of our lives.
Also like a lot of Kentucky kids, some of my earliest memories are playing basketball on the blacktop, pretending I was Patrick Sparks or Tayshaun Prince. In my head, that blacktop wasn't just a driveway; it was Rupp Arena.
I dreamed about putting on a Kentucky jersey, running out of the tunnel at Rupp and hearing the crowd. At that age, I was convinced that maybe someday it could actually happen.
My grandfather and I watched every game together until the day he passed away. I was a freshman in high school when I lost him. Ironically, that was also around the time I started to realize that I probably wasn't going to be tall enough or fast enough to become the college basketball player I had imagined myself becoming on that blacktop.
But I never stopped watching Kentucky. The night of my grandfather's visitation at the funeral home, Kentucky had a basketball game. When I got home that night, I turned the game on and watched it in the same room we always watched it in.
I knew he wouldn't want me to miss it.
After he was gone, my mom and I kept watching. Kentucky basketball and football remained constants in my life even as everything else started changing.
I graduated high school in 2007. By then, I had already started working at a local pizza place in 2006.
And then I just worked.
There wasn't some grand plan where I graduated from high school knowing I wanted to become a software developer. For years, my life was basically work, sports, and computers.
I loved computers, but back then that mostly meant hardware. I built custom PCs, played games and enjoyed tinkering with them. Coding was something I always thought I might enjoy, but I had never actually tried it.
Meanwhile, I continued moving up at work. The teenager who started at the local pizza place in 2006 eventually became the General Manager.
Nearly two decades went by.
Then the company changed ownership. There were changes, some that I agreed with and plenty that I didn't. Then they asked me to operate multiple stores with no increase in compensation. That was the moment something clicked.
I needed to find another path. In fact, the day that I was asked to do that is the day that I enrolled in school for programming.
At that point, Connect Blue didn't exist. I wasn't even trying to launch a company or build a sports platform. I was trying to build a different future for myself.
Then I took my first coding class, and I was hooked. Eventually, I took a class in Swift, Apple's programming language for building apps. For the first time, something I'd spent most of my life consuming—software—became something I realized I could actually create.
That's when two parts of my life that had always existed separately finally came together:
Computers and Kentucky sports.
As a Kentucky fan, I was constantly bouncing from website to website trying to keep up with everything. One site had this story, another had something else, and discussions happened somewhere else entirely. Many places required monthly subscriptions if you wanted the juicy information.
Now, there isn't anything wrong with those businesses charging for what they provide, but I started wondering if there could be another way.
What if there was one place where I could open an app and see Kentucky news from all of those different outlets?
That was the original idea. It wasn't some massive sports platform. There weren't fantasy games, season predictions, advanced stats or most of the things that exist today. The first version was basically going to be a Kentucky news aggregator. Any outlet producing Kentucky news with an RSS feed could appear together in one news feed.
Then I thought it needed discussion boards, free of course.
Then I thought it would be fun to have live chats where Kentucky fans could experience games together. Those things together were pretty much the entire app. Even the name wasn't Connect Blue yet.
At different points, I considered BBN Connect and then Big Blue Connect before eventually landing on Connect Blue.
I started working on that little iPhone app around October. Looking at Connect Blue today, it's almost difficult for me to believe how simple the original version was. I mean, I'm literally writing this article using an article publishing tool that I built inside the same platform.
Then basketball season ended. During the offseason, I started wondering if Connect Blue could be something more than a place where people read news and talked about games. Those things are still at the core of what I want Connect Blue to be, but I wanted fans to have things they could actually interact with.
I would see season prediction graphics posted on X all the time. Most Kentucky fans probably have their own predictions for how a season is going to go, but not everyone knows how—or wants to spend the time—to make a graphic to share those predictions.
So I started building things that allowed fans to participate. Make your prediction, pick your scores, see how you did, then share it with somebody else.
Then the question slowly changed from: "What can Kentucky fans read here?" to "What can Kentucky fans do here?"
Around the same time, I came across a game called 82-0, which I am sure many of you have heard of and probably interacted with. The idea behind it became the original inspiration for what eventually turned into Connect Cards. I created a basketball version inside the app. The idea is that you get daily card packs featuring players from 2005-present. With those cards, you create a five-man lineup and see how far you can go in the tournament.
Then football season started inching closer. I began to think about how Connect Cards could become something fans could interact with throughout an entire football season rather than just another feature sitting inside the app. That eventually became the fantasy football mode.
And that's basically how Connect Blue has grown. There wasn't a giant roadmap sitting on my desk when I started. I didn't know last fall what this would look like today. I would think of something that might be fun or useful for Kentucky fans, then I would figure out how to build it. Every time I learned how to build something new, Connect Blue got a little bigger.
It is dramatically different today than the app that I started building almost a year ago, but strangely enough, the goal really hasn't changed. I want Connect Blue to be a place for Kentucky fans.
A place where you can open one feed and see Kentucky news from different outlets. A place where fans can talk to each other without the conversation being locked behind a monthly fee.
A place to follow the games, make predictions, play games, collect cards, argue about basketball, celebrate wins, complain about losses and experience all of the things that come with being a Kentucky fan.
I would love for Connect Blue to eventually become successful enough to support me financially. I am not ashamed to say that. Building and operating something like this costs money and takes an enormous amount of time. There will eventually be optional subscriptions with additional perks, and perhaps ways for people who believe in what I am building to support it directly.
But there is one principle that I will not lose along the way:
The information itself shouldn't be stuck behind a Connect Blue paywall.
Maybe someday Connect Blue becomes something bigger that reaches college sports fans across the country. Who knows? For now, though, I want Connect Blue to be Kentucky fans' place to be.
As Matt Jones says, "Kentucky fans are just different. They just are."
So I went out as a Kentucky fan and built an entire sports platform centered around Kentucky.
This one is from one Kentucky fan to another.
While I am not running out of the tunnel at Rupp Arena, I know that kid on the blacktop would be proud of this.