Welcome to CougCenter United!

A little over four years ago, in August 2008, Grady Clapp and I founded CougCenter. I was running my little WSU basketball blog, and Grady was doing his thing over at Stadium Way. (In fact: If not for a domain squatter, this site would have been named Stadium Way. Not too many of you know that!)

We had about 3,000 people visit the site in that first first month. Total.

Since then, CougCenter has grown into one of the premier destinations for Cougar fans on the Internet, thanks to a writing staff that is thoughtful and incisive in its commentary and a community that is engaged and vibrant. Like much of the SB Nation network of blogs, we had developed into a full-service website, outgrowing our previous blog format.

Now, thanks to SB Nation’s United initiative, we’ve finally got a site that matches the content. And we couldn’t possibly be more excited -- for you!

We know the new format is going to take some getting used to for the thousands and thousands of you who visit the site each day now, and we know change is always a little hard. There probably will be some bugs to straighten out along the way, and we anticipate that you might have a little more difficult time initially finding what you were used to finding quickly, so we thank you in advance for your patience with that.

But having had the opportunity to play around extensively behind the scenes with the new site, I can say with a high degree of certainty that it’s not going to take long before you see just how awesome this is -- not for us, but for you. Some changes will be obvious; some more subtle:

• Our dynamic design capabilities will allow us to feature the stories that matter most to you. There’ll be a lot less hunting down the page for an interesting thread that was buried under four other stories.
• CougCenter -- and the entire SB Nation network of sites -- will load faster and run better than before.
• The CougCenter experience will now be seamless no matter what platform you’re on -- computer, tablet or mobile.
• And, perhaps most importantly, you’ll still see that we still same functionality we had before: The ability for all of you to post FanPosts and FanShots and the live updating and nesting commenting that clearly separates the SB Nation network of sites from its peers.

And all this started with a reader emailing me in my WSU Hoops days with a little tip: ""Hey, SB Nation doesn’t have a WSU blog. You should check them out."

At the time, I never could have imagined what CougCenter would become. And now that it’s here, I wonder what else is in the future that I can’t imagine.

I obviously don’t know, but I’m excited to find out along with all of you, the ones who actually make CougCenter possible. Thanks for coming on this ride with us. It’s going to be fun!

Jeff

P.S.: If you haven't taken the time to view the intro video, giving you the tour of everything SB Nation United has to offer, I highly recommend it!