Official launch day – July 29, 2015

July 29, 2017 marks the two-year anniversary of the founding of Canes and Coffee.

For the nostalgic types, it is not overly interesting, but here is the launch article from July 29, 2015. More on the ice from the same day, check out my article recapping the Canes 2015 prospect camp. That article had Sebastian Aho ranked first among the forward prospects in the Saturday scrimmage and also raved about (and ranked second in the scrimmage) a mid-round pick who has since risen up the prospect depth chart and could be a dark horse for the 2017-18 opening day roster.

THANK YOU!

I cannot express enough how thankful I am to everyone who has helped Canes and Coffee at any point over the past two plus years reaching back to the initial fundraiser in June of 2015.

—Thank you to everyone who contributed to the launch of Canes and Coffee including Kickstarter contributors (See our Founders’ Page.) and also the numerous people who provided feedback and encouragement when the site was being built and launched.

—Thank you to everyone who played a role in getting the site off the ground, especially Rob and Drago at Oak City Tech, Jamie Kellner for providing photos and Marty Smith from Curagami for sharing his insight and experience designing content sites and building online communities.

—Thank you to everyone who generously chipped in a few dollars in the spring and early summer to help us remain up and running.

–Finally, thank you to everyone in the Carolina Hurricanes hockey community who spends a small part of their Hurricanes hockey time at Canes and Coffee.

Steps forward in 2016-17

In the name of always trying to improve but also balancing that with the reality that Canes and Coffee needs to fit behind work, family and even some amount of sleep, 2016-17 offered a couple steps forward.

–The writing team expanded modestly in quantity to four but tremendously in terms of talent. Thanks to Jordan Futrell, Cory Fogg and Andrew Schnittker for adding more voices and quality content to the site.

–We embarked on a new way to cover prospects pulling in analysts, scouts and writers who are local to individual Hurricanes prospects, watch them at the same level we do the Hurricanes and were capable of providing deep, ‘from the rink’ insight on the team’s future.

–We did a couple rounds of guest articles that offered an interesting and eclectic mix of articles. The last article with links to the previous seven articles from this past week’s reader week is HERE.

–And my favorite of step forward of all has been the launch of the Coffee Shop articles on Monday and Thursday. The steadily increasing participation and the growing number of insightful comments by our community of knowledgeable readers is becoming the best reading on the website many weeks. One great example is the July 6 Thursday Coffee Shop article on what would seemingly be a slow summer hockey day but instead turned into a 56-comment discussion trying to hash out the last 3-4 forward slots in the lineup.

A sneak peak at 2017-18

Thank you to everyone who has contributed financially and also those who shared feedback in our 2016-17 survey. Armed with what we learned in 2016-17, a good amount of quality reader feedback and a tiny bit of money, the aim for 2017-18 is to again keep what people like from the previous season and take another step forward.

I will save the details for closer to the start of the 2017-18 season but share a few teasers.

–Based on survey feedback, we have identified a handful of coverage areas that are of greatest interest to readers, and we are working to do some combination of adding more of it to existing articles and are even considering adding another writer or two and/or new regular article categories.

–After forging two years deep without selling anything, Canes and Coffee will finally add a handful of logo items for sale. This time we mean it. 🙂 By no means will we morph into a merchandise hawker, but per intermittent reader requests we will finally have a few items for those who are interested.

–Limited by the fact that Canes and Coffee has exactly zero employees, we also aim to do a few more things out in the hockey and broader community during the 2017-18.

–Finally, we will be pacing ourselves in 2017-18, so we have enough fuel left to cover Canes hockey into late April, May and hopefully even June.

If you have not contributed yet, please a modest contribution in the neighborhood of what it would cost to buy us a cup of coffee. We promise to put your coffee money to good use covering our hockey team during what should be a fun 2017-18 season. Our Coffee Fund is HERE.

The best is yet to come both on the ice at PNC Arena and at Canes and Coffee!

Thanks and Go Canes!

Matt Karash