I have a friend who is a senior in high school, who is basically deciding between UNC an UMD as his choice of school for next year. Obviously, I've been recruiting him very hard on the merits of the school, had him on some visits (I feel like I'm Wallace Loh's assistant coach as I'm writing this), and praised the merits of in-state tuition.

But this kid is an absolute diehard basketball fan. As it was for me, when I was weighing UNC and Maryland as options, he wants to go to a school where he's going to have the most fun cheering for athletics. UNC's incredible tradition as a basketball school holds some serious weight for him in the decision.

I've been trying to sell him hard on how much more fun it is to root for an underdog, how our team is on the rise, how he will never have the chance to storm the court at UNC, etc. I simply told him that Maryland fans care more about the team than UNC fans do, which he immediately disagreed with.

To prove my point, I showed him the two blogs: Testudo Times and Carolina March. I showed him how there were 7 comments in the entire UNC-NC State game thread while there were 1000+ for the Maryland-Miami game. While his decision is still in the balance, he was impressed at the rabidness (is that a word?) of the fan base as emphasized by the blog. I argued that if Maryland was even close to as good as UNC was every year, our crowd would be 5x the crowds in the Dean Dome just because UNC draws so many casual fans because they're so good.

Long story short, I felt proud showing him the merit of this blog. I felt proud at seeing our school's blog have multitudes more traffic than any other sports blog I've seen. It's made me even more proud to be a Terp. So thank you, Testudo Times, and all who inhabit it and make it as successful and awesome a community as it is.