Cuso Sports Network

Everyone has their first - the website the was a lot of fun, exciting, and full of first-time mistakes. For me, that website was Cuso Sports Network.

It was my Sophomore year in college in St. Louis, MO, and I was having an identity crisis. I was homesick (I had moved to STL from Omaha, NE), and my entire life I had planned on being an engineer, only to realize that I wasn't interested in that career path at all. I was working at the photo counter of a neighborhood Walgreens, which led to a regular sleep schedule of staying up late, and barely waking up for my 2:00p shift. My life consisted of netflix, work, a few classes, and a general feeling of not knowing what I wanted to do in life. You know, the typical college grassroots story.

My mind would wander while I was scanning photos at Walgreens.

"How did I even end up here?"

The answer to this question lied in a flawed collegiate recruiting process. My entire life until this point had been focused on being a competitive soccer player. Practive 6 days a week, a state champion medal, and traveling across the region with the Nebraska Olympic Development program. I felt that I was a good player, but the only offers I was getting to play in college were coming from expensive Division III schools (partially my own fault I learned for not putting myself out there enough).

I had decided to try to walk on to the University of Missouri - St. Louis's Division II program. Ultimately though, the team was filled out, and I was left to experience the university I had just moved to as a regular ol' non-student athelete.

I remember being angry. My general feelings were around the premise that it was athletes against the system, and that there should be an easy way for athletes to promote themselves and earn money doing so.

This was the first time I had ever had the desire to create something. I knew there was lots of regulations about college athletes earning money (Name-Image-Likeness wasn't around at this point), so I decided to shift my focus to individual athletes with control over their brand.

My focus became clearer: I wanted to help up and coming extreme sports athletes get sponsorships.

My only problem was... I didn't know anything about extreme sports. I knew that if I really wanted to get athletes to trust me with their sponsorship attempts, I needed to learn everything I could about the industry.

This is when the idea for my first website came about!

I decided I was going to create a news website (it was just a wordpress blog), where I would write articles about all of the current events in extreme sports. I would learn about the industry in the process, and my hope was that I would start getting access to athletes, whom I could later begin to approach about helping them with sponsorships.

At the time, I thought I couldn't do this by myself, so I called up one of my best friends Hunter Amoruso. We talked it over, and decided to call the website a very cool mashup of our names (Callen + Amoruso). Thus, the Cuso Sports Network was born.

I rapidly learned everything I could about creating a wordpress site. I bought the .com domain, created the site, and slapped Google Adsense on there to make money. From that point on, I made it my goal to write as much content as I could about extreme sports.