It’s the end of August and I’m starved for Rangers news. It’s a desert out there, bone dry. We can speculate lines, how much ice time AV will give Staal or who will play 3C till the cows come home but instead at the request of one of our discord members (sup Tori) I am going to give some insight into how this crazy podcast all started.
This story starts way back at Marist College, the Harvard of the Hudson, a college I should have never attended and where I would end up meeting Greg. I ended up transferring to Marist my junior year because I had some friends over there, they seemed like they had a good Masters programs (I was wrong) and frankly the place was beautiful.
Shockingly enough, Greg and I were hardly even acquaintances during our time at Marist. We shared some friend groups, I knew him as the guy who was obsessed with the Mets that also enjoyed yelling and just so happened to finish 7th in every single fantasy league I was in with him. My interaction with him was limited at best.
Everyone graduated, I ended up staying an extra year to live with my then (demon and probably possessed by the devil) girlfriend and finish my Masters in psychology. Other than fantasy, I pretty much lost touch with a lot of my close and not-so-close friends, lived possibly the worst year of my life, graduated and Googled “What can you do with a Master’s Degree in psychology” and in return was told “No results found”. Needless to say, I needed something to do with my life.
The following year, I was in a rather dark place but I decided to attend our alumni weekend where Greg and a bunch of other people who have be on the podcast a few times would be. My goal was really to cheer up somehow by any means possible, which in this case just happened to be drinking way too much, like you do. Unfortunately for me a lot of drama unfolded for me that weekend concerning the person I previously lived with but one great thing did come out of it.
I spent most of the night at the alumni open bar convincing people to join a sports blog. I knew most of the people in the group I was hanging out with were sports communications majors and I gave my best elevator pitch for a website and somehow I got Greg and 9 others to give it a shot. We made a Facebook group, came up with the name “The Waiver Wire” and bought the website Thewaiverwire.co (I believe it is now owned by a foreign company).
The website had mediocre success by our standards, we even had a post that hit top 3 on reddit in 2013 getting something like 400k hits I believe but sooner or later most people fell off writing for the site but somehow the Facebook group had become a breeding ground for all day discussion. This is where Greg and I became friends, in a Facebook group that had quickly become the people I talk to the most. We somehow ended up adding more people, growing way closer and then planning meet ups a few times a year (Shout outs to Brohegan).
We talk about anything in The Waiver Wire, but I had a trend of pitching ideas and most of them were fucking terrible. One week, I really got into the idea of making terrariums (you read that correctly), turns out I was awful at it and it was a terrible business idea. I was the king of half-baked ideas and not sticking to my plan, it became a joke that I wouldn’t stick with anything I was doing and I kind of just went with it.
Podcasts at this time had become my primary hobby. I had been listening to The BS report since 2008, got into Radio lab and a few other shows but there was nothing better than on a commute to throw on a show and just delve way too deep into a subject. I fell back in love with Hockey around 2012, I had taken a break for much of my high school and college years but I spent my childhood with a Brain Leech poster above my bed, I was ready to be back and luckily
Finding a Rangers podcast was near close to impossible. There was one Rangers show, it was on BlogTalkRadio and they were both doing their best “I WANNA BE MIKE FRANCESA” impressions. I couldn’t listen to it. Over the years I would keep looking for Rangers Podcasts and it continued to be a graveyard, nothing ever showed up. At the start of 2015 I began bugging Greg about starting one of our own. It was another idea that quickly became a joke in our Facebook Group. The idea popped up once in a while, then I watched the Kings beat the Rangers in the longest 5 game finals of all time and the idea of a podcast fell to the way side.
Flash forward to next season, I trolled the subreddit as I usually do and I continued to see posts that said “Rangers hockey podcast?” with no responses. The results were the same for me, there was nothing out there and I was pretty fed up with it. Thanksgiving came and went, I got a blue yeti mic, learned how to use audacity a bit and DRAGGED Greg kicking and screaming to our first episode (that may be an exaggeration). As we hit record for the first time, I got way too nervous. I think we restarted the episode 3 times. Not that episode one is up on the internet because we weren’t paying for hosting at that time but you could hear a tremble in my voice, which is ridiculous looking back at it. We posted the episode on Reddit and… got some actually nice responses?
One person on reddit said: “Hey, not bad. You seem like a natural at this. One thing: gotta have better audio for Greg. Looking forward to the next one.” Little did they know we would fix Greg’s mic only a year and a half later!
I even posted in our group after posting the episode “43 plays! 10 of which are from me so that’s good, hooray!”
We continued to post every single Tuesday morning until present day, I had to make a promise to myself that we wouldn’t miss a show and that we would always do it just for fun and so far, we’ve stuck to that plan. Looking back now it’s pretty humbling to see how far we’ve come. We’ve learned how to make a show, grown bigger than both of us ever could have imagined, we are launching a website (IM GOING TO GET YOU GUYS MORE STICKERS THAN YOUR BODIES HAVE ROOM FOR SOON), started an LLC and it seems like we are just getting started.
And most importantly, it’s not a joke anymore.
Thank you to every one of you for all your support, we have a lot planned for the season and I hope you all enjoy being part of the breakaway.
Author: Ryan Mead
Ryan is the creator of Blueshirts Breakaway, a collector of Christmas sweaters, a man who makes a yearly calendar of himself and an avid brunch enthusiast
Ryan also has constant cold sweats due to Rick Nash’s breakaway during game 7 vs the Lightning, every time a puck hit the crossbar in overtime in 2015 and when the Rangers didn’t trade Keith Yandle.