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Welcome to the 25th overall episode of Create Your Shot.

As always, Tyler Lorry, Chris Smalls, Angeloos here.

This is, I think, our 17th interview, and we've had eight episodes of Pick and Winners, but 25 episodes Smalls, this is a pretty big deal for us. We could have been canceled after the first one, honestly. Yeah, we can get canceled at any time. I think that's what kind of keeps us going, you know? That's the fuel that kind of fires us. Any time this could just evaporate into thin air.

Right.

So when we get to 25, we want to make a big deal out of it.

We popped a little champagne on this interview.

This week we have Sam Vassini.

He is a writer for the Athletic, specifically for the field house, which is their college basketball-based site.

I think it's run by Seth Davis. So Sam works with some pretty heavy hitters, at least in our industry. And he was a guy that we just kind of reached out to because I see Sam on Twitter all the time. And he's a young guy, a year younger than me, same age as small, lives in Cali with his girlfriend. And was a guy that was really interesting to hear talk about like how he got

kind of market share in this field as like just a you know sort of a young guy who in grad school was

like man I really like writing about sports and I really enjoyed it because it was different like

his you know talking about breaking down tape as a guy who wasn't really a coach or a player like

it was really different and I also thought his interests were different, too.

And this is kind of what we wanted to say is like for people out there who think that they're, you know, unique or they're trying to do something. Like there's always people that their journey can help you. And I thought Sam, especially for media people, he doesn't consider himself a journalist. So we should get that out of the way right now. But I thought Sam was cool. Like I thought the way he talked about breaking into the industry and knowing different people and working with them, I thought that was awesome.

Like it was not any different really than we would probably talk about as coaches, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I think, you know, just talking to different people on his journey, like you said, is so different than the next person person and that's kind of been the interesting thing to do about these through these 25 episodes is just

finding different people and they're different journeys but sam you know he he had a medium he

loved the game of basketball but he liked showing you know you know, the intricate details of, you know,

breaking down film and then showing that to other people. So like you said, he took that niche,

that talent he kind of had and then just ran with it. That's what he wanted to do. So he worked

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