This Nomad is Moving On

When I started reading Voodoo Five back in 2011, I was teaching English at Munwha Presbyterian Academy High School in "beautiful" Gyeongju, South Korea.  I came home from work one day and took an unintentional nap. The lights were on in my apartment. I had a dream that USF basketball was playing a game in the Burger King on campus. As it was a lucid dream, I forced myself awake, and just started giggling.

For a few months, the image of people dunking in a Burger King kept popping up in my brain, and I kept giggling. Then I saw the nifty FanPost feature on Voodoo Five. Since the SunDome was being renovated and USF basketball was playing elsewhere in 2011-12, I thought it’d be funny to write a FanPost series with USF playing in different buildings on campus. I’d even keep all the real stats. The title of the first post was Campus Nomads 1: USF vs. U. Tampa at the Burger King next to the College of Education. Thus was born Campus Nomads, a series I hoped someone out there would think was funny, that started from a dream, and ended up with me writing for this blog for three years.

As someone who was about as far from USF as one could get (although I did see Terrence Leather play a pro game in KBL, the Korean Basketball League), discovering and eventually contributing to Voodoo Five not only kept me in touch with USF fandom, it intensified my own fandom. The big secret about teaching English in Korea is the ungodly amount of deskwarming, so watching USF games and writing these stories helped me fill that time, and when I came back stateside V5 was a fun way to take the pressure off looking for work.

Recently, I was presented with an opportunity to work on another project, one too good to turn down. It had to be, because leaving Voodoo Five isn't easy. This has been a great home for three years, a place with knowledgeable, passionate writers, and more importantly, great and sometimes hysterically funny readers and commenters.

You all reminded me that USF has a unique fanbase. We’re all older than USF’s entire football history, and going back further, USF has had a nomadic basketball conference history as well. A bit like I’ve been a nomad: I’ve lived in three countries since I starting writing for V5, not including Bulls Country.

Voodoo Five strives to encapsulate that uniqueness, and I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to do my part. Collin’s been gracious enough to say I can come back and write in the future, so I’ll pop in here and there, but for now, this nomad is moving on. I can’t thank y’all enough.