Samford Scoop - How It Started
“So Grant, what did I miss today?”
As a kid, all I watched was SportsCenter. Pick your favorite summer day and I would be awake around 8:00AM. I either turned on my PlayStation for MVP Baseball 2005 (the best sports video game of all time) or went straight to ESPN. I was obsessed with getting the sports news of the day so I could tell my Dad when he got home from work what happened that day. I wanted to be first.
There is still some of that in me to this day. Nowadays, it’s the usual Jeff Passan trade tweet or Woj Bomb tweet. I like to give the hot news first in whatever group chat I am in.
So now, let’s fast forward to the 2019 spring semester, my senior year, to my Sport and Communication class at Samford. Our semester project would be to develop a sports blog. We were given free reign to develop an idea for our website. Two other classmates and I created a blog called, The Athlete. In that blog, we wrote stories about one specific athlete and then did podcasts about our athletes. I also created and ran our Twitter account. I would tweet out story links and reply to many people trying to build an audience. My first story was about former Birmingham Iron defensive back Jamar Summers. The story was viewed over 200 times, I was definitely surprised. That would be the start of what was yet to come.
Jump forward to May of 2020, I had just been laid off due to the COVID pandemic. I knew that I had this Twitter account but I wondered what I would do with it. I realized that there were zero other fan accounts related to Samford sports. On Twitter, Barstool Sports has accounts related to their schools and that’s what I wanted my Samford focused account to be. I reached out to my brother, Blake Gardner, and he thought it was a great idea. It just needed a name. We are Oklahoma fans and a popular site covering Oklahoma sports is called SoonerScoop. So I just replaced “Sooner” with “Samford”, created a logo, and I was all ready to go. The Athlete became Samford Scoop.
I had to find a way to get the Samford community involved so I first followed every single coach, team account and support member for every sport. I then started a 100 day countdown to Samford football filled with stats and plays to that respective day. That grew the follower count even as the FCS season was pushed to the spring. I knew that this could be something. I get to be the one, like with my Dad and my group chats, to give you the news about Samford sports first.
Back to writing, from May 2019 to the beginning of April 2022, I did not do any. However, when Bucky McMillan got hired, I wrote a story about the hiring in April of 2020 and that story finished with over 600 views (and a lot of what I wrote came true, just saying). The story blew up after Samford put up 174 points in an exhibition game versus Greenville University that upcoming season. That was in the back of my mind on the writing side of things.
Throughout the next few seasons, I would tweet game recaps with stats, and even use the latest viral meme finding ways to make it Samford related. I was in the background doing my thing and I was content with that. However to scale something like this, I needed to step out of my comfort zone but I was not really sure how to do that.
This past July, Sam Devaney who runs The State of the Bulldogs podcast, reached out to see what my vision was for the Samford Scoop Twitter account. I told Sam I wanted to develop a website covering Samford sports. Luckily, Sam and his other podcast hosts, Michael Wilson, Jeb Gebhart, and Eli Bissell shared the same vision. Weeks later Sam and I met in Birmingham to get acquainted and come up with a plan. Step one would be for me to join the podcast. Speaking of getting out of my comfort zone, this was how I was going to do that. That is not technically new territory as I do have some experience speaking out to a public audience. I worked with Samford sports in producing radio broadcasts, halftime shows, and even did some color commentary for men’s basketball and soccer.
So with that being said, now we want to introduce The Samford Scoop from the StateoftheBulldogs.com. I enjoy writing about sports and my goal is to provide the best coverage of Samford sports that the great athletes in Homewood deserve. I along with Sam, Mike, Jeb, and Eli are committed to doing just that. I get to take what I learned and enjoyed in my Sport Communication class and apply it to The Samford Scoop.
I cannot wait to get started. This is a side project as I do have a full time job but I do want to write game recaps and opinion pieces while keeping the reader up to date with all things Samford sports. My Twitter DM’s are open to story suggestions among other things.
“And Here. We. Go.” - The late Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight, circa 2008.
Grant M. Gardner, @GrantGardner_ on Twitter/X
