By DAVE O’SULLIVAN Publisher When you’re an athlete you have to endure a lot of pain and sacrifice to be any good at your chosen sport. You know there are going to be those days when your legs hurt, but you have to put in those three or four miles when you don’t feel like getting out of bed because it’s 35 degrees with a chilly northeast wind. You take cuts in the batting cage until there are blisters on both hands so that you are ready when it’s a tie game in the bottom of the seventh inning and that closer is throwing 88 on the black. There is a lot of failure an athlete has to deal with, and some simply can’t. With each higher level you get to, it becomes tougher to be as good as you were at the previous level. Confidence can dip as the pressure increases. You start to wonder if you can get the job done. There was some failure in my career that I had to deal with a few years ago. There I was, 40 years old and my newspaper career was starting to look like a Dumpster fire. I had been laid off for the second time in six years, a victim of what is commonly referred to in the business world as “reduction of force.” I had some success early in my career. Won three New Jersey Press Association awards, and in the late 1990s had turned a weekly newspaper’s sports section from four pages of below average coverage to 10 and sometimes 12 pages per week of award-winning high school sports coverage. For two of the three years I was at that newspaper it was voted as the top weekly sports section in the state. But in the past decade or so, large daily newspapers have cut staff drastically and I, unfortunately, was one of those mid-level salaries who are among the first to be cut when it’s time to trim down the roster. I was kind of like a veteran relief pitcher on a Major League Baseball team: talented and valuable enough to get the job done, but replaceable enough with a more team-friendly salary. So, there I was in the spring of 2013, 40 years old and my career was looking like a rusted out pick-up truck on the side of a rural county road in a town nobody really drove through anymore. Like most young writers, when I was in my early 20s, I figured by the time I was in my late 30s I would be writing for Sports Illustrated, hanging out in MLB clubhouses. Ah, the dreams of youth. 
Glory Days Magazine’s 50th print edition cover featured the Egg Harbor Township softball team, which got off to a 10-0 start this season. I had a decision to make. I could have tried to get a job at another newspaper, but did I really want to continue to work nights and weekends for a salary that would allow for the basics, but not much else? I probably could have made my part-time foray into the restaurant business during the past 20 years more of a full-time gig, but that wasn’t where my passion was. I knew what I wanted to do, but, truth be told, my confidence was a little shaky. I knew I could write stories about high school sports that people would be interested in an enjoy reading, but I had never run a business before. And while covering high school sports is great and provides daily excitement, running your own magazine is still a business venture and that side of things must be attended to as vigorously as game coverage and feature stories. My brother, Paul, knew my passion for writing about sports and he said to me, “go for it, man. What do you have to lose?” So I bought myself a camera, took the few thousand dollars I had in severance from being let go at my last job, and started Glory Days Magazine. Or, more accurately, started the website a few days after I got laid off. The first print edition came five months later. I remember one of the first events I attended was an Absegami girls lacrosse game. I went up and introduced myself to Braves coach Judy Callahan, explained who I was and what I was doing there. She looked at me as though I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. “Who are you again? What publication?” At least in the age of digital photography it’s not too hard to get decent photographs, so I started posting stories and photos to acglorydays.com and talked to anyone and everyone about what I was doing, trying to generate some interest in my new venture. It’s been a long, tough road the past three years. I’ve had to eat a lot of dollar store pasta. I’ve worn out the soles in a couple pairs of shoes going from town to town trying to get local business owners to believe in what we are doing and to buy advertising space in Glory Days Magazine. There have been a lot of nights when I was awake until 3 a.m., cranking out stories for the latest edition. When you run your own business, it’s not a 9-to-5 gig. It’s an all day, every day thing. And, thankfully, I have had some great help along the way from people such as our graphic designer, Amy D’Adamo, Director of Advertising Bill Lynksey, Managing Editor Giuseppe Ungaro, Staff Writer Nick Kosko and our delivery man, Gabe Santoro, among many others. These people believed in me, which is why this is our 50th print edition. Quite a milestone for a guy who had a few dollars and a dream a few years ago. There is still a long way to go to get to where we want to be, but the sacrifice and effort have proved to be worth it, and the support and response from our fan base has been amazing. We look forward to continually putting forth our best for you. Contact Dave O’Sullivan: sully@acglorydays.com; on Twitter @GDsullysays [adsense]
Commentary: Reaching milestone 50th print edition worth the effort, sacrifice
