Established 1992 - Retired 2024
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The YOUNKER NFL Pool effective immediately. I have been running it since the 1992 season, which makes this the end of 32 seasons running the pool. It's predecessor was an office pool run by a colleague at the office I worked at beginning in 1989 (the 1988 season was into the playoffs when I came on board). He even had a number of players faxing in their picks! That gentleman ran it for a couple more years before leaving the company for other pastures. Someone had to pick up the torch and run with his pool after he left. And that turned out to be ME. The first few years, I ran it as a paper office pool, just as he had done, and even continued to accept faxes. Then along came the internet a while later. I put the pool up online as a hybrid. That is, paper, fax and internet picks were accepted. (And by "internet," I mean via email!) As you might imagine, this was a ton of work. I was doing everything manually: printing, faxing and posting picks on the web. Results and standings too! There was no "football pool" software yet so I was doing this on spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3!) and converting those to web pages. It gives me a headache now just thinking about how much work it was. We were, just as it had been before me, a pay only pool. A buck a week to enter, and the winner collected the pile of cash collected each week. I kept nothing (unless I won, of course!). Once online, we soon added the option to Play For Free in an effort to attract even more players. I then had to manage the free entries AND the paid entries (in what we called The Club). This was done separately. Heh! Nothing like adding more work for myself. Back in those early days, we already had the Super Bowl Squares pool too although it mostly was for the office folks only. Somewhere along the way, the year escapes me now, I came across software that allowed me to move the pool fully to the web with no more spreadsheets. By then, faxes had died off but we still had a few people emailing picks. We discontinued the emailed and paper picks and went strictly online with the web page. Talk about easy street! Well, at least compared to the previous way of doing things, this was a huge step forward! The software continued to evolve over the years, and things got easier and easier. I even suggested a few tweaks to the author that would make my life easier still, and some of those were adopted. Over the years, the software added a few options here and there. Some we adopted in The YOUNKER NFL Pool, like the Survivor Pool and later the RANK 'EM pool for the post season. Some we didn't because they seemed uninteresting. One or two that we tried came up lame, as in, not-so-popular. One of these was a chat room where we could B.S. and talk trash. We tried this on more than one occasion and it fell flat each time. Oh well. Not everything works! Also, somewhere along the way, about 12 years ago I think, the software I had been using came to a halt. The author decided to call it quits. A couple of faithful users picked up the baton and made still further improvements, making us pool managers' lives even easier. We loved it. In fact, I had looked at some other options available about that time but found this software with its new authors to still be the "one to use." The YOUNKER NFL Pool peaked at around 85 or 90 players many years ago I think, perhaps with the occasional week of over 100, but we have shrunk over time. It's all good though. We have had a lot of fun, no? And well, life moves on, right? The main author of the two guys running the software has decided to retire after the recent 2024 season. The remaining author is doing a replacement version. It won't have all of the features of the 2024 version though. He is inviting only a small group of long time pool managers to try it out in 2025. I thought long and hard about continuing but to be totally honest, I have been considering my exit/retirement from managing the pool for a few years now. This seems like a good time to close the curtain. It has been a ton of fun for me, and many of you have emailed me over the years telling me how much fun you have had. I thank each and every one of you for playing all of these years, and for your feedback. I am sure that during football season this year, I will feel that something is missing. Retiring from The YOUNKER NFL Pool after 32 years will leave a hole for me but also warm memories. Thanks for playing and see you in the pool, uh, around... P.S., I may do a Super Bowl Squares pool this season. Not sure yet but stay tuned. --Dennis Younker |
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