Many of you have contacted me about the future of FLN since I have not posted since mid-June when the FHSAA went with their huge change to the high school lax world.  We are still in business! My absence has been one of personal choice as I seriously needed to take a break.  It’s been almost 8 years now since I starting writing for FLN and the longest break I took away from this was about a week and, as I mentioned before, have been doing this as a hobby aside from my normal way of making a living, which is also time-consuming.  I went full cold turkey, including not opening my emails or looking at either the Twitter or Facebook pages (rest assured, we are adding Instagram this year!). I opened my email today for the first time and there are 738 emails waiting for me.  Good and bad news I guess.  It will take a while to work through those but it also indicates how vibrant the Florida lacrosse community is!  Many high school commitments, college press releases and various other comments, inquiries and articles waiting for publication. Never mind the upcoming high school season and the annual previews . . . high school coaches, be warned now, be responsive to our questionnaire!  Our response rate barely ran 50% last year and there’s no excuse to pass up getting your program their fair share of coverage! I’ll be spending this weekend starting to catch up (with the football playoffs in the background) and let’s get back in gear! Some things for readers to look forward to: We are looking at another redesign, using Joomla instead of WordPress, as it is a cleaner look in my opinion. The Home Page will reduce the amount of content on it and we will work towards integrating more social media and video.  There was too much duplication of content on the page and this way we can increase the number of feature articles and how long they spend within easy reach on the home page. There will also be an increase in advertising on the home page and that brings up another point.  The Florida lacrosse community needs to understand we have provided this content FREE ever since inception.  All costs have been borne by us, and we want to keep doing so to our readers, but that will require that over time the community take seriously our advertisers and be willing to put them in your decision-making.  We are going to target the higher end advertiser outside the lacrosse community because our demographics of readership is a very attractive market.  As time goes on you will see what we are referencing. The long awaited Instagram WILL HAPPEN this year. We have asked a family friend of mine who is YouTube experienced to help us get our YouTube capabilities up and running and hopefully I’ll be able to host a Sunday night live broadcast where we can reveal the weekly Media Top 25 poll (how that poll gets adjusted by the split to 2 levels I need to think through).  That would be a LOT of fun for our viewers! Okay, once again, we thank you for your patience as we needed the break!  We look forward to a great season of bringing you all the news from around the state, at all levels!