Summer Projects

We are looking forward to some fun and exciting projects to embark on over the summer. On the schedule for sure is Operation Kayak Adventure. Being a highly experienced kayaker, which means I've been on the water twice, we are planning a four day, three night trip on the Cedar River. We're going to start around St. Ansgar and end wherever it happens to go. OKA is still in the early planning stages as lodging and river obstacles are being accessed. We're shooting for a late summer launch.

Another project in the works is titled Green, White, Checkered. It is going to be a road trip around Iowa to visit as many dirt tracks as possible. Our target is ten to fifteen tracks. We already hit our first, as our "home" track, I35 Speedway in Mason City, had their opening night of races on April 11. It was a little chilly to say the least but a fun night of racing nonetheless.

The inaugural The Sportstew Golf Invitational is taking shape. It looks like a sponsor for the event is very close to signing and the host course has be narrowed down.

As our technical know-how evolves, some podcasts will be produced. The eventual goal is to have bi-monthly podcast episodes available for your viewing pleasure. We look forward to posting some random, highly opinionated news articles, interviews, maybe a even a mailbag, and other miscellaneous tidbits.

Welcome

This all began as a simple idea. Two sports enthusiasts that met at the Univ. of Northern Iowa and became long time friends, wanted to bump their love of sports up to the next level. That idea evolved into the Brown Woods Index. The BWI was born in March of 2008. We created a formula that compared multiple college basketball statistics and assigned a value to each team. The BWI rolled out just in time for March Madness that year and surprisingly, to us anyway, correctly predicted the Kansas Jayhawks to win the NCAA Tournament. A year later, we dusted off the BWI and went the next step. We used it to predict all the the conference tournaments, the NIT, and the NCAA Tourney. The BWI correctly picked 11 of the 31 conference winners. The NIT was a complete disaster and doesn't even warrant mentioning. For the Big Dance, we had three of the Final 4 and correctly had North Carolina bringing home the crown. We submitted the BWI bracket on the ESPN Tournament Challenge and finished in the 97.6 percentile, not to mention we walloped Golic and Greenberg. We created a website, thesportstew.com, to post our brackets so others could follow along. We both had so much fun doing this, we decided to expand our website so we can dabble in blogging, podcasts, twitter, and other new technologies. Well they're new to us anyway. Keep checking back as there will be plenty of fun ahead.