I never really sat down to tell the whole story of Northern Pitch, our new Minnesota-focused soccer website, so now – almost two months after it launched – is as good a time as any.

I’ve been covering Minnesota pro soccer officially since mid-2012, and unofficially following the teams – first the Minnesota Thunder, then the Minnesota Stars, now Minnesota United – for a lot longer. This led to the SoccerCentric blog at startribune.com, where in 2013 and 2014 I did my best to churn out as much soccer coverage as I could while working for free. During that time, I also had lunch with my friend John Bonnes, of Twins Daily and KFAN / Gleeman and the Geek fame, about once every six months.

The first time we had lunch, I managed to pique his curiosity enough that he told me to “keep on me” about starting up a soccer website under the MinnCentric umbrella. So I bothered him for two years. And during that time, more and more people got interested in writing about, and covering, pro soccer in Minnesota.

So, in January, I sent out a feeler email to most of the local soccer-writing community, asking them to sit down and listen to John talk about what we might be able to do. Basically, the MinnCentric umbrellas takes care of the two most annoying things about independent sportswriting – IT infrastructure, and advertising sales. This leaves those of us who just want to write a chance to focus only on that, and even make a (very small) amount of money along the way – attractive, for someone like me who’d been writing for free for two years.

I didn’t know if anybody would be interested – and frankly, had they not been, the whole thing would have died. But almost to a man, they agreed to be part of the team – and that’s how Northern Pitch got here.

I could enthuse further, but instead I’ll just link you to what I’ve written for the site. I’ll be doing United game coverage, a weekly look at the MLS schedule, and the occasional column – but even better, there are nine other guys besides me, all of whom are pumping out unbelievably excellent content.

It’s been fun. It’ll continue to be fun. I’m thrilled it actually happened. And all it took was two years of pestering John about it.