Allow me to introduce myself

Hello all,

Before I get to introducing myself, I’d first like to take this opportunity to thank Coup and SJ not only for giving me the chance to take care of their baby but also for the work they’ve put in over the last few years in creating one of the pillars of the Trail Blazers’ online community. I’ve been a regular reader of RCP for a while and I’m honored that they chose me to keep this great site going. More so than fans of any of the other major sports leagues, NBA fans have created an incredibly diverse community of blogs that cover all corners of the sport from all sorts of unique viewpoints, and I’m incredibly excited to become a part of that in a more major way.

I should probably tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Sean Highkin. I’m 21 years old, and I’m a junior at the University of Oregon. I grew up in Northeast Portland, so naturally I’ve been a Blazers fan since I was very young. I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember, although I’ve only gotten into sportswriting recently. I wrote record reviews for my school paper in high school, and writing about music is still a passion of mine. In 2008, I started a music news and review site with a few friends called One Thirty BPM (shameless plug alert) that over the last two years has grown from something four of us threw together in our spare time into a site that gets tens of thousands of unique visitors a month and has relationships with most of the major record labels. It’s something I’m extremely proud of, and I continue to serve as features and columns editor.

A few months ago, during the NBA playoffs, I said to myself, “wait a minute, I have a lot of opinions about basketball, why don’t I try writing about that too?” I did the Bleacher Report thing just long enough to realize that I wasn’t interested in writing for a glorified message board, and then started my own NBA blog, which I updated sporadically over the summer. When Coup decided to, if you will, take his talents to South Beach and this opportunity opened up, I jumped at it without even thinking twice. Coup and SJ picked me and Mike Acker, and for that I am grateful. They can rest assured that their site is in good hands.

Mike and I are in charge of Rip City Project now, but at the end of the day, this is your site as much as it is ours. Feel free to email me with questions, feedback, suggestions on subject matter for the blog, or just to chat about anything. I have more or less a completely open-door policy when it comes to reader interaction. I’ll be posting from RCP’s Twitter account, which you should be following by now anyway, and I also have my own personal Twitter account that I update regularly, so feel free to follow that too. I have a lot to say about a lot of different subjects. As for the future of RCP, I have some ideas in mind as far as a direction to take the site, as does Mike. I’m not going to say too much on that matter right now, but as we head into training camp and then the 2010-11 NBA season, you will see Rip City Project 2.0 unfold, and I think you’ll like it.

That’s enough about me for now. I look forward to working with Mike to uphold the high level of quality you’re used to from Coup and SJ, and to evolve the site.