We are extremely excited, humbled and proud to announce that section303.com took second place in the Best Blog category in the 2010 Toast of Music City Awards!
The annual awards event, sponsored by The Tennessean, was tonight at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville and it was a who’s who among important people in Middle Tennessee.
In short, we had zero business being there.
In the two previous years of the Best Blog category, Nashvillest.com had won both times. Despite their third place finish, they were the blog to beat this year as they were no doubt the favorites going in. The winner of the category were Liza and Elizabeth over at StyleBlueprint.com, a fashion, food, etc. blog that’s extremely well done and a must-read for anyone with interests in style and fashion. They took home the categories top prize on this night.
You can follow both blogs on Twitter via @nashvillest and @styleblueprint, respectively.
We showed up to the awards with the goal of growing the sport and raising awareness and excitement for the upcoming season. Yes, of course people know there’s a hockey team in Nashville but how often do we get to influence people from all walks of life to come out and see a game? So, in order to do that, we each wore a shirt and tie to comply with the “business attire” dress code but we wore our Nashville Predators jerseys over them. We figured even if one guy, in the back of the room, who never met us, considers taking his family or clients to a hockey game all because he saw three idiots show up to an awards event with their jerseys, well… then we’ve done our job.
Codey Holland and Jeremy K. Gover represented section303.com at the Toast of Music City Awards Thursday.
Besides, given the other two nominees, by being named a finalist at all we were indirectly named the best sports blog in Nashville. Thus, this was probably the only time in the history of Tennesse where ice hockey had the sporting spotlight all to itself. You don’t really expect to give us a football-free stage and have us keep quiet, do you? We had to do our part!
Awards are great and accolades are wonderful but the real reason we were honored to be nominated was not for pride’s sake or even for a sense of accomplishment. The real reason we were honored is it meant having a forum with business owners and corporate leaders and getting them to think “You know this hockey thing? It might be worth looking into.”
We’ve said this before but it bares repeating: While it’s true that we’d still blog even if we had no readers and we’d still produce podcasts even if we had no listeners, this nomination is all because of you and we can’t thank you enough. You’re one of our many loyal readers and listeners and the pleasure is all ours to serve you only the best news, notes and opinions from Predators Nation. This award only encourages us to keep doing what we’re doing.
Sorry wives.
Furthermore, no words can describe the outpouring of love and support we received based on our We Are Nashville blog. We diverted from our hockey roots to band together for a common purpose and that purpose was to help our neighbors amidst a 1,000 year flood back on May 2 and 3. Little did we know it would become a rallying cry for a city just days after a catastrophe.
We blog and podcast because we’re just three guys who were born and raised in non-traditional hockey markets who have a true passion for the sport. We take a tremendous sense of pride in growing the game and we hope that at least some of the people who only came to our site for We Are Nashville will at least catch a little bit of that passion and give the game a try.
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INSERT PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Gover // section303.com