The Fast Break is getting better!

Thanks to numerous reader pledges coming in, we're adding a premium offering to our men's basketball coverage!

March 08, 2023

Since our crew left Rivals this past offseason, we’ve started posting our UConn men’s basketball reporting in this newsletter. The goal was to create an outlet similar to the WBB Weekly to start going above and beyond in coverage of Husky men’s hoops.

Hopefully, you liked what you saw in articles like these, delivered straight to your eyeholes via email:

Why are you telling me this?

Well, Dear Reader, you may have noticed we don’t do these articles around every game. But it’d be pretty cool if we did, right?

With that in mind, The Fast Break is adding a premium component. A handful of readers have made unsolicited pledges, which was enough for us to give this a shot.

From now until the end of the season, we’ll have on-site coverage for every UConn men’s basketball game in the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament.

Our hope is that this serves as a model for what this publication can be on a game-by-game basis in the future, with post-game press conference videos and detailed analysis including shot charts, advanced box scores, etc.

We also want to be open and transparent about how the whole thing works. This is pretty much the only way to survive as an independent media outlet in the year 2023.

This level of coverage requires multiple peoples’ time, energy, cameras, computers, gasoline, and sometimes even hotels (and a slush fund for bribes, obviously). Our team is made up of decent people who love sports and work hard. We have decades of experience in journalism and photography and have been working on podcasts and video for years as well.

We believe our product is worth roughly the cost of one coffee per month.

This started as a fun side project, but it’s led to full-time jobs and people with full-time jobs in this field joining us. We’ve been lucky to earn some money along the way through a new-media blogging contract and our previous contract with Rivals.

Out of the 150,000+ people who check out The UConn Blog on a monthly basis, our hope is enough of you will consider supporting us as we move away from the advertising-driven model in the interest of bringing you deeper and better-quality coverage. The local media infrastructure has crumbled around us, but we’ve kept growing and we aren’t going anywhere.

What does this mean for me?

During the Big East and NCAA Tournaments, you’ll start to see more free newsletters and podcasts, and additional content will appear for subscribers only.

The vision for The Fast Break men’s basketball coverage looks like this:

For All Readers:

For Premium Subscribers:

  • Advanced stat box score for each game

  • Performance Report Cards tracking trends and keys to victory

  • Detailed recruiting coverage

  • Reporting on Huskies in the NBA and overseas

  • Summaries and info nuggets from advanced stat and other paysites

  • Big East & national reporting - Think Matt Brown’s Extra Points, but UConn-flavored. What does NIL mean for UConn? What’s the future of a basketball-led league in today’s climate? Wtf is going on with the XL Center? These are the questions we can start to work on finding answers for.

  • Video coverage & analysis - When ESPN was founded, an outlet dedicated to sports sounded crazy. Today, an outlet dedicated to the sports teams of a New England flagship university is possible thanks to technology like newsletter platforms and streaming. Our Youtube channel has 10,000 subscribers — look out for more great stuff there!

 The cost is $6 per month or $60 for a year

Our Team

Aman Kidwai

A 2010 UConn graduate, Aman has been working as a business reporter for three years, including stops at Business Insider and Fortune Magazine before joining Morning Brew. He’s been managing The UConn Blog on top of a full-time job (with some breaks, for fun) since 2013, and also was Publisher of the UConn Rivals site from 2015-2021.

William Paxton

Paxton is a longtime sportswriter and former beat writer for the CT Post covering UConn football and men’s basketball. He has since worked with the UConn Rivals site in addition to freelancing for the Associated Press, Hartford Courant, and a number of other newspapers around the country.

Ian Bethune

Perhaps only David Benedict goes to more UConn games than Ian does. From the first soccer game to the final out of baseball season, and Geno’s golf tournament and WNBA in between, Ian can be seen in Storrs, Hartford, Mohegan Sun, and beyond with his camera at games. He’s been with The UConn Blog since 2015 as a photographer and editor and is the main force behind the Storrs Central YouTube channel.

Shawn McGrath

Shawn is a 2018 UConn graduate who has been with The UConn Blog since 2016, working on coverage of hockey, baseball, and soccer. He now manages a whole heap of responsibilities including The UConn Blog’s men’s basketball coverage and The Fast Break’s Friday newsletter. As Bob Diaco liked to point out about former backup Husky quarterback Garrett Anderson, Shawn is married. And like Bob Diaco, Shawn lives in New Jersey.

Daniel Connolly

A 2020 UConn grad, Connolly’s work can be found across The UConn Blog, UConn WBB Weekly, and UConn Hockey Hub covering the women’s basketball juggernaut and one of the most interesting programs in college sports in UConn men’s hockey. He’s a full-time reporter who has been covering these two teams for eight (women’s hoops) and five (hockey) years.

Megan Gauer

A 2016 UConn grad, Gauer’s work is featured on The UConn Blog and WBB Weekly, including as the co-host of our women’s basketball podcast Chasing Perfection with Connolly. Megan also writes and podcasts for Her Hoops Stats and has had articles published in the Washington Post. She has contributed to our men’s basketball coverage in the past on the UConn Rivals site and will continue to do so for us in the future once we can afford some more of her time.

Dan Madigan

A 2017 UConn graduate and former sports editor for The Daily Campus, Madigan works on coverage for any and every sport on The UConn Blog and has some involvement in most of our newsletters. He is well-versed in the rich history of UConn’s basketball programs and the university as a whole and was also on hand at the 2016 women’s basketball national championship to capture the greatest photo in sports history.

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