The article proclaims Buffalo as the “last simple place in the NFL.” But the article shows the very opposite. The rest of the nation sees being so tied and loyal to a football team as simple; but actually, if the Bills and Western New York were in a Facebook relationship, we’d have to check off, “It’s Complicated.”

For example, the Buffalo Bills regionalization plan isn’t exactly simple – nor is it exactly new or limited to NFL football. The Bills became the first NFL team to regionalize marketing in an effort to grow a fan base. Now team vice-president Russ Brandon’s regionalization plan kicked off in 1999 – years before the team’s Toronto series started. Brandon kicked off this plan by moving training camp to Rochester, opening a ticket office in Pittsford Plaza, and engaging the Syracuse community in marketing plans. Regionalization isn’t new – before the Bills existed, the 1940s and 1950s Cleveland Browns engaged in a more primitive form of extended reach, leaving pockets of Browns fans as far out as Syracuse to this day.

Regionalization is also not an idea limited to the Bills – many entities have gone regional in an effort to survive. Currently, TV news in the area is going regional – Time Warner local news is now run out of Buffalo for both Buffalo and Rochester. Colleges are going regional – Medaille College, located down the street from the Buffalo Zoo, opened a robust Rochester campus a few years back.

So regional marketing is not simple – it’s a strategic and complicated decision to keep entities afloat. And it’s a decision that would not work everywhere – it works in Buffalo and Rochester because inherently the two cities are tied to each other’s fates – geographically close, but philosophically closer.

The Bills’ emotional impact in the area – an idea demonstrated in the Yahoo! piece by the fact that Buffalo workers are much more productive the days after a Bills win – is also not exactly simple. Western New Yorkers are more tied to the Bills than most areas are to a sports franchise because it provides a sense of belonging and a horizontal allegiance for a geographical area that has always seemed rejected by two countries. We have Canadian tendencies, but Canada wants nothing to do with us. Like them, we tell long stories because we have to kill a lot of time indoors during the winter. We make idle chatter in grocery stores because, like Canadians, we’re too friendly. We have strange Canadian like accents. And we share Canada’s love affair with hockey and lacrosse. That Canadian way of living elicits scorn from the rest of the United States. Canada labels us pretenders and the United States laughs in our faces. Thus Western New Yorkers tightly grasp the allegiance that the Bills provides us. It is an identifier for an area outsiders do not wish to acknowledge.

The Bills also are a barometer of the economic fate of the region – another “simple” fact alluded to in the Yahoo! article. When the Rust Belt wrapped itself along the Great Lakes, the Bills suffered. Bills football became the escape for the downtrodden and out-of-work lower middle class abandoned by the flight of manufacturing jobs, but that football suffered because the economy was in the tank. Buffalo and Rochester have now started to find their way by engaging in the tech and education industries, becoming the two fastest growing areas economically in New York. And as that economic recovery starts up, the Bills have gotten better.

So to say that Bills football is simple could be considered misleading. There are few sports entities that are so embedded in the identity of a geographic area like the Bills are. The Bills are a cultural touchpoint and regional indicator instead of an aggressively promoted pastime. Let’s put it bluntly – there are not too many sports franchises you can make so many doctoral thesis style points about. But you can about the Bills.

Truth be told, I don’t mind the delayed start. I was able to approach the draft and subsequent roster moves with the feeling of being over-prepared for a test. On the plus side, I could see who had potential beyond their draft ranking. I could see what teams’ defense are weak and will allow for offensive players to rack up the points on them.

But, much like being over-prepared for a test, I went into drafts and lineups over-confident on picking upon Week 1 performances that may not end up indicating a darn thing. I picked up Buffalo Bills’ tight end Scott Chandler as my backup TE after his stellar performance against the Kansas City Chiefs, but he’s somewhat of an unknown quantity. Will that pick turn out to be a good one, or was I too motivated upon a performance that may be an anomaly?

The other plus to a late starting fantasy football league? A second chance. I started 0-1 in my other league, which is not quite the end of the world. But when you’re playing only 12 of those 16 weeks of the regular season, it can seem like it. Starting off another team in another league renews your enthusiasm.

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I hope the Buffalo Bills defeat the Oakland Raiders this afternoon for a very selfish reason. My high school’s colors were black and silver, and our uniforms always looked especially Raider like. The Raiders were the second biggest NFL team among the kids in my neighborhood on Rochester’s East side, where I grew up, so my classmates and neighbors coveted Raiders memorabilia. 

One fall, my parents’ dryer was broken and they couldn’t afford to replace it right away. All of our clothes were hung on the clothes line in the side yard – including my sister’s modified soccer jersey, a black and silver long sleeve with a giant silver number on the back. The jersey had been on the line all of four minutes when we saw a flash of a boy run through the side yard, grab the jersey and run. He thought he had snagged a Raiders jersey, but he would soon find out he had grabbed a girls modified soccer jersey.

So in a bit of revenge for all of the School of the Arts jerseys mistaken for Raiders jerseys and stolen over the years, I hope the Bills beat the Raiders.

The Buffalo Bills new uniforms, one part of a throwback Friday in Western New York. (Photo: BuffaloBills.com)

For Western New York, Friday was a day where old things were new again in the world of sports.

One of the American Hockey League’s traditional franchises, the Rochester Americans, were purchased by Terry Pegula and the Buffalo Sabres. My hometown Amerks had fallen on some tough times in the past few years, with a declining attendance and a lack of talent coming with their 2005 affiliation with the Florida Panthers. Even with increased effort (which kept being promised, but rarely seen), it was going be very difficult for the Panthers to live up to the classic days of the Sabres-Amerks affiliation, where the Amerks developed Ryan Miller, Marty Biron, Jason Pominville, Steve Shields and many others.

Buffalo’s sports teams – the Bills and Sabres – have had to take the more regional approach to maintaining a fan base due to the area’s declining population and economy. Pegulia’s purchase of the Amerks and their reaffiliation with the team makes huge overtures to the regional appeal of the Sabres franchise. Pegulia gets it – he knows that the Amerks are a key part of keeping the sport of hockey popular in his fan base’s region.

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Friday evening, the Buffalo Bills held a grand new uniform unveiling – despite the design being leaked in a Madden 2012 promo a few weeks back. The design harkens back to the 1970s and 80s, with a white helmet and a heavy use of classic styling.

With Ralph Wilson Stadium as a backdrop, the Bills trotted out players from the Super Bowl heyday – Jim Kelly signed autographed and modeled the new jersey, while Steve Tasker hosted – and used local service people to show off the new-old gear.

One of my Facebook friends commented, “Why are they outfitting the Bills in the styles of the old days? These teams will never compare to the players that wore these styles in the past.” I don’t think the duds are something to be lived up to – they are distinctive from uniforms past – but more of a statement. The Bills, as a franchise, are classic, much like the Packers or Cowboys. No need to go futuristic for a team that has represented for so long what the sport of football’s most dedicated fan base has always been, for a team whose fans weather thick and thin. The new Bills uniforms remind us of the tradition and the circular nature of the NFL – how the Bills were woeful once before, then turned it around and had a run unlike many other teams in history.

Plus, everything old is eventually new again. That means that dark navy, silver and red of the 2000s should come back in 2030, right?

I was pursuing Facebook this morning to find that my Uncle had linked to an 1979 edition of the ad to wish everyone a Happy Easter. So here I am, doing the same. Here is the House of Guitars “Hop, Hop, Hop” ad from 1979. Happy Easter to those who celebrate.

 

The school district I grew up in is facing a dire budget crisis in every school. All schools and most departments have been given unrealistic budget figures for the next school year, and are looking at the massive reduction in educational services to meet those figures.

My high school alma mater, School of the Arts, is gaining a lot of publicity for its fight against these budget reductions. In an article in today’s Democrat and Chronicle, they claim that approximately half of their arts funding will need to be cut, as well as reductions in the AP and honors courses that they honor.

I attended the school from 1994-2000, from 7th-12th grade. I initially applied as a dance major, but my vaulters physique (square and broad shouldered) and my disintegrating knees quickly led me to creative writing. But the school did much more than teach me how to write with grace, but challenged me academically and taught me the social graces blue-collar teenaged me was sorely lacking (look people in the eye when you speak, dress appropriately, when hobnobbing with your much more gifted, educated and wealthy classmates and their families, don’t let on that your dad was laid off again and doesn’t own a car.)

So to hear that the school that taught me so much and made me the successful person I am today could lose the core of what makes it special is heartbreaking. But despite the Facebook invites and pleas to stop the cuts and “save our SOTA,” I can’t lend my voice solely to the cause.

My little brother – the one who was born a month after I started my first year at SOTA, the little baby and toddler I would proudly carry around the school on Open House nights – is a sophomore at East High School. He didn’t get into SOTA, though he applied and had two sisters as alumna. He has some problems with learning, difficulty with test anxiety, problems with reading comprehension. He is still an incredibly bright student, a polite and caring person, and possesses the same Canadian biting sense of humor that runs in our family. He was blessed to be in a special program at East that finally got him on track academically and made college a possibility – when my parents were told that it wasn’t years before.

That program, Rochester Matters, was cut last year.

My little brother is still working hard, still at East, and still wants to go to college. But his school faces massive cuts too, ones that will devastate the 1714 students that attend the school, who are mostly from homes around the poverty level in some of Rochester’s worst areas. They are cuts to programs that provide vocational training, that help decrease class size, honors classes, remedial classes, classes for those with borderline learning disabilities.

Besides my little brother, my mom, aunt, cousin, and best friend’s mother all work in the district, and see first hand how budget cuts affect students everyday. My mom, a elementary lunch lady since 1988, serves most of her students their only meal of the day. She knows this because they tell her so. My aunt, a school secretary, has had to deal with students and parents from her school being murdered.

You then understand why I can’t fight just for my alma mater, a relatively small school that serves a relatively well-off population in regards to the other high schools in the area. Everyone is facing unfair cuts. And my dog in this fight is my little brother. I may have been picked as “Most Political” and “Most Likely to Plan Our Class Reunions” when I graduated from SOTA in 2000, but I can’t pick SOTA over the other schools that are working with some of the most underprivileged in the city. I do hope SOTA gets their funding restored, but I hope East, #52, Franklin and others do too.

I worry that my stance – and putting said stance out here publicly, something I’ve debated for weeks – will alienate me from the teachers that made me who I am today. But I can’t partition off one issue from the much larger issue. And sometimes, you have to side with your family. I want my brother to go to college, and my family and friends to keep their jobs.

Last spring, the band released their first album without co-founder Steven Page. The second song on the album, “Summertime,” is an ode to Western New York-Southern Ontario weather; a response to those not from the area who ask, “How do you put up with all the lake effect snow, wind and cold?” The answer? “We’re all pushing through till summertime.”

I have been fielding many questions in the same vein lately now that Greater Boston has been hit with three snowstorms in a month’s time. “How did you put up with weather like this?! How does your family back there handle it?” So, Bostonians, my answer and advice to you in song form. “Keep on pushing through for summertime.” May it become your winter 2011 anthem.

Summertime – Barenaked Ladies (YouTube)

Since my birthday is so close to New Year’s, I tend not to make New Year’s resolutions, but goals tied to my birthday. I’ve settled on four goals for my 29th year, and since this year’s are actually interesting, and things I need my readers to assist with, I thought I might share them with you.

So here is the first of my 4 For 29.

The Seabreeze water slides. (Photo: Seabreeze)

1.) Learn How To Swim

When I was 10, my mother presented me with a choice to continue taking dance classes or take swimming lessons at the East High School pool. My parents couldn’t afford both, so I had to choose between the two.

I remember my mother sitting with me at our tiny kitchen table with the two typewritten registration forms in front of us. Our faux-maple round table was the place where all important family conversations took place, from “Why did the principal call me and say you refused to go to music class?” in first grade, to “Your mom and I can’t contribute any money to college,” twelve years later. Obviously, on the scale of conversations the table had seen, this was on the mild end.

“It’s important to learn how to swim,” explained my mother (who has made it a career to reason with elementary schoolers about their lunch choices, and for that, she’s deserves more shots than I could ever buy her.) “But you are a very good dancer, and I know you like that.”

I had made it that long without learning how to swim, so I wondered aloud how crucial that skill would really be.

“Well, do you want to be able to go on the Seabreeze water slides without a life jacket?” asked my mother. (For the non-Western New Yorkers among us, Seabreeze was one of our area amusement parks, and at the time, they had recently added water slides.)

I was blunt. “Not really. The lines are too long.”

And because the Seabreeze water slide lines were too long, the decision was made. I wouldn’t learn how to swim. This wasn’t a big deal to little kid me – I had no access to a pool, knew no one with a pool, and the sport was one of the few Olympic sports I had no desire to try.

High school came and went, and seeing that I attended to the only Rochester City School District high school without a pool, the district’s swimming requirement for graduation was waived for my school. My little sister and brother ended up learning how to swim because of a free program that was established a few years later, but by that time, I was too old to participate. Tto this day, I have never learned how to swim. And you know what? It hasn’t really impacted me that much.

Until now.

Those who follow me on Twitter regularly know that I was waylaid by a nasty illness through November and December, and while sick, I was diagnosed with moderate asthma. It explained a lot of the problems I’d been having, and I’m feeling amazingly better now that I’m being treated for it.

Included in the asthma diagnosis is a limitation of some of the physical activity I can do, and a suggestion that I swim for exercise. Swimming is one of the best exercises an asthmatic can do, given the humidity and warm temperature of a pool.

So, I guess I finally have to learn how to swim.

But where exactly does a 29 year old learn how to swim? I can’t just sign up for “Tiny Bubbles” or “Little Minnows” toddler swim classes. I did sign up for an adult learn-to-swim class twice before, while in grad school, and both were canceled because I was the only registrant. Where can I go in Boston or on the North Shore to learn how to swim without having to discuss Dora the Explorer with my classmates? Better yet, where to learn how to swim without having to take out a loan in order to afford lessons?

More importantly, what type of swimsuit do I buy?

So dear readers, your help is requested. Do you have any suggestions for me?

The glimmer of hope at the Bills-Pats game on September 26th. (Photo taken by Kat)

This is what being a Buffalo Bills fan in Boston is like.

It is going to work for sixteen Mondays every year and having your boss throw his hands in the air, sigh heavily and say, “Kat! Those Bills! So close!”

It’s your newest star wide receiver Tweeting his best Nancy Kerrigan impression (StarGames and Jerry Solomon, jump on that like a trampoline and sign him up.)

It’s your mother-in-law asking you for sixteen Sundays every year if your team lost again and asking you why you don’t root for that “Brady fella.”

It’s snagging some hope, however mis-derived, that your Harvard educated quarterback resembles a quarterback more than any since our Doug Flutie experiment of a decade ago. It’s overhearing two Monday morning quarterbacks jump on the commuter rail at Swampscott, joking that while the Bills might be horrible, that Fitzpatrick has the story of the year, given we have such a stereotype of quarterbacks as oggling knocking-up Neanderthals (thanks Brett Favre.) It’s Patriots beat writers and radio hosts trying to find something to talk about on an off Sunday, and asking if Fitzpatrick is the only active quarterback who wears his wedding ring while he plays.

It’s knowing that your owner is on his last legs, and that born-in-relevancy-again Jim Kelly can only pray that he has enough investors to buy the team when the phone eventually rings. It’s knowing that the region you’re from is so economically depressed that it’s not a breach of fandom that caused season tickets holders sell their tickets to Steelers fans, but most likely holiday economic necessity.

It’s knowing that if you ever have children, they probably won’t grow up knowing the Buffalo Bills. That they may be in Toronto or Los Angeles. And for that reason you hang on despite three painfully close overtime losses, despite balls slipping through wide receivers fingers, through waiver pick ups who go straight to the injured reserve, through all of it. Because you know, no matter how much you want to fight it, that it’ll soon be a relic; something to remember, not something to experience.

The Bills don’t just hearken back to a time where they won AFC Championships, but a time before Buffalo and Rochester were victims of the Rust Belt. Back when the blue collar workers of the region had jobs, drove American, could afford season tickets, and loved players seemingly as blue collar as themselves. That’s all gone – my dad and his punch press manning colleagues have the perpetual sense of dread hanging over their heads that today could be the day no more parts need to be made, and don’t have an extra cent to drive out to Orchard Park. Their friends couldn’t renew their season tickets because their jobs left for the sunnier and cheaper climate of Mexico or don’t exist because us Americans only like our Hondas these days.

So I am a Bills fan in Boston, though it would be easy to give into the Brady and Belichick of it all. Because being a Bills fan represents where I am from is and now was. It’s football fandom as a means of keeping relevant a region that, unless it gets 23 inches of snow on December 1st, is no longer relevant to most of this country.

It’s keeping something alive that no one seems to want to root for anymore: the underdog.

Tuesday afternoon, I received an email from Billy Baldwin, Binghamton class of 1985. Not exclusively to me, of course, but to me and thousands of my fellow Binghamton alums. Billy, who is the lesser known Baldwin by far (at Binghamton, when anyone would ask what he had been in, the stock answer always was, “the guy that dies in Backdraft“), has taken quite the shine to his alma mater as of late. His biggest contribution of note was when he led a successful campaign to save the wrestling program when America East stopped sponsoring the sport.

Now, Billy “Backdraft guy” Baldwin has emailed his fellow alums to lobby us to give to the Binghamton capital campaign. (Video wasn’t embeddable, so here is a linked screenshot.)

My first reaction: shouldn’t he be lobbying for himself? You really don’t see him in much anymore. Then I realized his more famous brother probably helps him out.

My second reaction: Paul Reiser wasn’t available? Tony Kornhesier? Heck, Progressive Insurance Flo? (Yes, all Bearcats.)

But that being said, it’s a good cause, given the dire straits outgoing NY governor Patterson has left the SUNY system in. Kudos to Backdraft Baldwin.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Twitter account shared a blog post about the new Wegmans (the greatest grocery store in the history of mankind) commercials, starring…30 Rock’s Alec Baldwin.

According to the Democrat and Chronicle, the Baldwin-Wegmans collaboration came about when Baldwin mentioned to late night talk show host David Letterman that his mother refuses to live anywhere without a Wegmans close by, and then went on to pontificate about the wonders of the store.

This is a big get for the store so wonderful it was my baby brother’s first word. (You think I’m joking.) But the way this week is going, I half expect to get a video of Stephen Baldwin asking me to buy Buffalo Bills tickets next.

When I was a fifteen year old, there were three things in this world I obsessively saved my babysitting money for: tickets to sporting events, programs at said events, and the amazingly delicious hot-out-of-the-oven M&M cookies baked at the deli next door to my dance studio. And when you were making three dollars per hour babysitting in the Rust Belt, those three things were the only meaningful things one could save up for.

Programs were one of the reasons I would attend games and shows. When I was really young, my hands would shake nervously when I would hand over my hard-earned money for a hockey or ice show program. I would insist on getting to events right when doors opened so that I would have as much time with the program prior to the puck drop, first pitch, kickoff, or opening piece. I would devour the program the minute I sat down. I loved the smell – that toxic ink plastic-like brand new smell that graced the pages, especially if this was the beginning of the season or tour or the first one in the box. The pages would stick together upon that first read through, which made me develop this unconscious habit I still have today of flipping through the program at a rapid pace at first to separate all of the pages before settling in to fully digest the content.

Anyone who attended anything with me usually knew prior to our departure of my love of programs and the fact that they would most likely be on their own so that I could read every single word of it before the event started. I didn’t mean to be rude, but to me, reading the program was usually better than the event itself.

Somewhere around the age of thirteen, I wondered if there was any way to write just for event programs. I jumped at the chance to contribute to my school’s theater programs whenever possible, but I really wanted to write for a ice show program or hockey program. I would occasionally ask one of my creative writing teachers how one might go about writing for an event program, and they looked at me like I had five heads (which, given that I was this wanna-be sportswriter in a creative writing program filled with classmates focusing on teenage-angst filled poetry, was an everyday occurrence. In workshop, I shared fiction pieces about a klutzy female sportswriter tripping over her own feet while covering her favorite quarterback’s Pro Football Hall of Fame induction, while the rest of my class shared poems about boys breaking up with them and feeling like an outsider in such a “crazy, crazy world.”)

Fast forward nearly fifteen years, with late twenty-something me working in education, dabbling in sports blogging, and living hundreds of miles away from Rochester. My father called me one Sunday afternoon asking if I wanted to keep the Rubbermaid box of programs. He was in one of his rare cleaning moves, and he was feeling the urge to purge the crawlspace.

“Of course I do, Dad,” I answered, taken aback that anyone would ever suggest throwing my precious memorabilia out. “If you hang onto them until Christmas, I’ll bring them back to Boston with me then.”

Dad obliged and went about purging my old Girl Scout Handbooks instead (with my permission.) But his question got me thinking. I’ve found an outlet for one teenage goal, sportswriting, through the six gazillion websites I attempt to contribute to on a regular basis. However, I had never found an opportunity to work on an event program. I had to remedy this, and the opportunity was literally under my nose.

The folks in charge of coordinating the Boston University-Cornell University Red Hot Hockey rematch had moved into the offices below my own. Normally, I’m not a bold person when it comes to asking to be included on projects, but I overheard them mentioning that they were in the beginning stages of putting together the program, and I jumped on it. Pete, the creative lead, immediately gave me the chance of a lifetime – design and write both BU and Cornell’s player profiles.

I have not worked that hard on a project since my senior thesis. When Cornell was ravaged by their H1N1 outbreak and couldn’t provide us with the necessary information on deadline, I ended up researching stats and facts for the entire Cornell roster. I made drafts upon drafts, measured every pixel I could, learned options and functions in Adobe InDesign I never knew existed. Then I was allowed to write a sidebar. Then I was allowed to fact check and edit a major story.

Then, last Thursday, I walked up to my office after a series of meetings and found one of the first copies of the program waiting for me at the front desk. It smelled just like the programs I had saved up to buy as a teenager, had the same glossy cover as those programs, but when you opened to the table of contents and read the credits at the bottom, my name was listed.

I can’t even begin to describe what it felt like to read a program and see my name in the credits after a childhood spent obsessed with them. I immediately thought of my first Disney on Ice program at age four that I dragged with me everywhere for three weeks, the Buffalo Bills Gameday program I bought the only time I got to watch Steve Young play live, and the beautiful ice show programs I collected as a tweenager. Honestly, I wanted to go back in time and tell fifteen year old me what had just happened and then do a Jonathan Papelbon-esque happy jig with her. Knowing this would eventually happen would have made sitting through the boy-angst filled verse over a decade ago that much more palpable.