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We ran across this blog post awhile ago--from a 6-6 Microsoft program manager recounting getting dunked on by Nate Robinson. Turns out the guy, Tim Getsch, also recently founded a pretty cool sports card sales site, CheckOutMyCards.com. We emailed him questions, he emailed back answers.
How did you end up playing basketball with Nate Robinson?
It just fell into place. I was playing in a summer league at the Redmond Athletic Club, and Jamal Crawford happened to have a team in that league. After playing a couple games against him, he liked how I played. So, his team invited me to play in the “Battle at the Lake,” which was at Green Lake. Nate happened to have a team in that tournament as well. We ended up losing to them for the championship. Jamal is an amazingly nice guy. I was extremely impressed by his character. When I introduced him to my wife, he acted like he was sincerely honored to meet her. I would think NBA players would get burnt out after meeting so many people all the time. Jamal is really a great guy.
Saw in your blog that you played some minor league pro ball. Where did you play in high school/college?
I went to Hopkins High School in Minnesota. They are a perennial powerhouse. I learned a lot about basketball from Hopkins, but I didn’t get much varsity playing time ... I was [also] captain of the math team. Coach didn’t really like it when I was late to games because I was coming from a math meet.
When I went to the University of Minnesota, I focused on school. I graduated with my B.S. in math when I was 19 and finished my M.S. in computer science at 21, just after moving out to Seattle to work for Microsoft.
Are there secretly some pretty good ballers at Microsoft? When you think Microsoft you obviously don't immediately think of incredible athleticism.
The Microsoft competition is nothing like the players on the Everett Explosion (ed note: the minor league team that Getsch played for), but there are a lot of competitive and intense people at Microsoft. Last year my team won the competitive division of the MSHoops league. Here's a photo of us as champions, I'm the tall guy in the white shirt.
How long have you been collecting baseball cards?
I started collecting when I was about 7 years old (1986), but I took a hiatus from collecting when I went to college and had no money. It was about 4 years ago that I got back into it. My favorite player is Orel Hershiser. It has been the pursuit of his cards that has inspired a lot of my collecting. My favorite sport to collect is basketball.
You can read more about my collecting biography from this blog post.
What made you decide to start CheckOutMyCards?
I am a math guy. I love numbers. Growing up I used to read all the stats in the sports pages, and I would study all the prices in the sports card price guides. My bachelors degree is in Math, and my masters is in Computer Science. Etopps.com sucked me back into collecting sports cards. It's a cross between sports cards, ebay, and the stock market. While I was surfing etopps auctions on ebay, I discovered all of these sets that I used to collect, and they were really cheap. So I ended up writing some software to catalog cards that were in auctions and bid on ebay auctions. It is based on Microsoft Access. By day I work at Microsoft as a Program Manager on Microsoft Access.
On ebay I ended up winning a ton of auctions, and a few times people contacted me about buying one or two of the cards that were in a lot that I had won. That got me to start thinking about building a website where people could buy my extras. So I built LowPriceCards.com, which was focused on selling cards really cheap. It was mainly just a hobby that allowed me to learn other technologies like SQL Server, ASP.Net, and AJAX, but I kept getting inquiries about other people wanting to list their cards on a site like mine. So last October I registered the domain CheckOutMyCards.com so that it could be more applicable in case people wanted to charge high prices, but this was still something that I was doing in my spare time.
Around Christmas, my wife and I decided to hire a web developer full time, and in February Andy Bird started as our first employee.
How's business?
We are still in the “investment” period. It has really only been in the last few months that we have started to push the site. We're now getting about 12,000 page hits visitors a day, and another 45,000 from search engines. We have shipped packages to 35 different states, the armed forces (APO AP), Puerto Rico, Canada, Australia, and the Czech Republic.
Every couple weeks we get feedback like this.
“I have searched a lot of sports card sites but this one beats every one I have ever seen hands down.”
Now that we are starting to get recognized for having the best sports card site, we need to start building our inventory. To do that, we are launching a couple new programs to allow people to list their cards on our site. The first offering will be a full-service consignment offering where people can drop their cards off with us, we scan them, catalog them, and they simply pick their prices. We then handle all payment processing and shipping. We are currently beta testing the system with a handful of collectors and dealers, and we hope to open that up to the public in the next few weeks. After that we have a several other ideas, but we will be listening to the sports card community to see what direction they would like us to go.
Thanks Tim! That site again is CheckOutMyCards.com.
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Orel Hershiser, even! Nice--and cheap--choice. I'll be keeping an eye on his site.