Shifting gears

Hi there. Been a while.

It's been four years since I last posted anything here, and over that span a lot of things changed. I moved from Charleston to Charlotte. I became single (again). I learned how to play guitar (likely a direct result of becoming single again). I annoyed many of my neighbors (likely a direct result of taking up guitar). I adopted four Siamese cats, and named them John, Paul, George and Ringo. And, I took a new job.

Well, another big change is on the horizon -- as of this afternoon, I'm no longer a motorsports writer.

Wow, that sounds weird. I've worked exclusively in motorsports since 2007, and for seven years before that racing easily comprised the bulk of what I covered. My first Daytona 500 was in 2000 -- how can I forget, I wandered around the vast infield lost for over an hour, wearily searching for this vague facility called a media center -- and I haven't missed one since. For over a decade, my life has been as closely tied to the motorsports calendar as that of any driver or crew chief.

So yes, to put it mildly, from a personal standpoint this is a notable transition. But companies make changes, and sometimes you're not a part of them, so you move on to the next deal. And my next deal will be two things that have always been near and dear to my heart -- the newspaper business, and Southeastern Conference football.

Indeed, dear readers, this Twitter feed is in for an abrupt left turn. Starting next week I begin covering South Carolina -- that's right, the Gamecocks and the Head Ball Coach -- for The Post and Courier, my hometown paper in Charleston, S.C. It's the paper I grew up reading, which my parents still get in their driveway every morning, where I worked every summer going to college and where back in the day I started out as a novice racing writer who knew zero about motorsports. I have a lot of dear friends there, and the SEC is the big dog in college athletics. Yes, I'll be trading the cosmopolitan sheen (if that's what it is) of Charlotte for the crunchy heat of Columbia, S.C. But in terms of a soft landing from an unexpected tumble, this is about as good as it gets.

I suspect right about now is when many of you are clicking the "unfollow" button, and that's just fine. But I'm still going to have fun with this, still try out lame comedic bits and nuggets about TV and music and those damned-near-sinking Atlanta Braves. I'm going to try and write more in this space about things far removed from the Gamecocks. And I'm still going to follow, and occasionally comment upon, racing. And why not? It's been a part of me for a very long time, and it gave me three of the best friends and many of the best experiences I will ever have in my life. I got to follow Jeff Gordon and Kyle Busch around New York, got to follow Kurt Busch around Washington, got to follow Brad Keselowski around Los Angeles, got to watch as people mobbed Richard Petty in Manhattan. It's been a wonderful ride, and I'm not going to let go of it completely.

So, that's the deal. I will absolutely miss so many of the wonderful people in the racing industry, most of whom I've tried to reach out to personally (if I missed you, apologies). I'll miss a lot about Charlotte -- the Whitewater Center, the Sugar Creek Greenway, the Auto Bell (as car washes go, that place rocks), the Starbucks in the convention center (my man David had my order ready as soon as he saw me), and the Original Pancake House in midtown, where they didn't even need to hand me a menu. I hate that I won't get to see Daytona Rising in its completion, or Jimmie Johnson perhaps win a seventh championship, or however this crazy new Chase plays out. But the last race I covered was Indianapolis, and watching Gordon win his record fifth Brickyard is a pretty damn fine way to go out.

The trade off? Being at South Carolina vs. Texas A&M on Aug. 28, in what will certainly be a frenzied Williams-Brice Stadium. Revisiting places like Auburn and Nashville and Lexington. Road trips that are three days instead of five. The unparalleled rush of college football game day. Hearing football pads crack. Returning to the world of ink and column inches, and a finished product with your byline on it that you can actually hold in your hands. That's not moving into a new job -- that's going back home.