OC Sports Zone marks second year anniversary during challenging times

Portola’s High’s football opener was one of the first games OC Sports Zone covered in August of 2018. (File photo: Fernando M. Donado, For OC Sports Zone)

OC Sports Zone marked its second anniversary on Saturday, July 18. The free website, independently owned by Orange County sportswriter Tim Burt and co-founded by Gabriel Calderon, launched on July 18, 2018 to cover high school and college sports in Orange County.

Tim’s comments:

While there is satisfaction that we’ve achieved many of our goals, including a milestone of reaching more than one million page views in two years, now is not the appropriate time to celebrate.

Rather, it’s a time to reflect on our current challenges as a county, state and country brought on by the devastating affects of the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented crisis which changed our way of life and has shut down high school and college sports since March.

We believe it’s important to remember the victims and we salute the heroic efforts of nurses and doctors and all the first responders who have put their lives on the line, and we hope for better days ahead.

Our hearts go out to all the dedicated coaches and athletes, especially the seniors who lost their final year of competition. We had hoped to continue to chronicle their seasons in the spring of 2020 before the pandemic hit. This was devastating for the athletes and their parents. That time and that experience sadly cannot be replaced.

However we would like to say how grateful we are to our readers for continuing to consistently read OC Sports Zone during these past months which has helped keep our small business stable as we look toward the rest of this year and 2021. Despite not having any live events since March to read about, our readers have continued to visit our site on a regular basis for our special features and we feel blessed to have this opportunity.

We are also grateful to our sponsors who have remained loyal: Mike Lockwood at Lockwood Retirement Consulting, Crean Lutheran High School, Santa Ana Unified School District, Santa Ana College, Courtclean and athletic booster clubs at Woodbridge, Portola, Northwood, Irvine, University and Capistrano Valley Christian high schools. Dan Selway’s youth football camp was one of our initial sponsors. Without their support we could not have provided our site free of charge to our readers.

All along, this has been a team effort from day one as we embarked on this exciting challenge, not really knowing how Orange County communities would react. Like sports, we’ve had some wins and losses, but have learned a lot in the process. We’ve been overwhelmed with the tremendous response and we look forward when sports can safely resume so we can cover them like we did in our first year and a half before the pandemic hit.

Special thanks go to Gabriel Calderon. You don’t see his name a lot, but he was instrumental in the concept and the launch, the growth and in every aspect of our operation. Gabriel, who coordinates advertising among other key tasks, continues to provide ideas for growth as we look to the future and the challenges that we, like any media organization, face as we wait for the return of sports.

We also salute the valuable efforts by free-lance designer Fernando M. Donado, who came up with a winning format, made some adjustments on the fly and also showcased his outstanding photographic talents by adeptly shooting many games, and writing about some of the games, and a couple of exclusive feature pieces too. Fernando, who photographed five CIF championship events in 2019, is a valuable part of our team and highly respected throughout Orange County.

Veteran free-lance writer Tom Connolly has been with us from the start and done some outstanding stories for us. Tom always makes deadline, no matter what the obstacle is, and his stories are compelling and accurate.

We’ve also had valuable contributions from photographers Jim McCormack, Mark Bausman, Jim Tomlin and Harrison Zhang, who provided courtesy photos. We are so appreciative of their photos, along with all of those in the community who have submitted photos and stories for us. In addition, Jorge Medina provided support.

We are here for our communities and despite the current pandemic and the shutdown of sports, our mission remains the same.

Thank you for your support of OC Sports Zone!

-Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com