Lesson
Early Entrepreneurship
Starting, owning, and sustaining a venture for roughly six years — the unglamorous discipline of keeping something running.
Web Venture — Revived
The Sports Judge
The Sports Judge is the live revival of The Sports Jury, the independent sports-media venture William Horschak founded with friends from the FTJ Sports Forum and grew from roughly 2008 to 2014. Rebuilt from the Internet Archive and relaunched, it is once again a working sports news & opinion publication — and William is among its top writers, with 1,698,163 career reader views across 53 published stories.
- Live — Revived
- Sports News & Opinion
- ~1.7M Reader Views
- Founded 2008
The Revival
A 2008 venture, rebuilt from the archive and live again
The Sports Judge is the present-day revival of The Sports Jury. William Horschak rebuilt the publication from the Internet Archive and relaunched it as a live sports news & opinion site — restoring the contributor-driven model that ran from roughly 2008 to 2014 and putting it back in front of readers.
Today, at thesportsjudge.com (opens in a new tab), the publication covers the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and basketball, MMA, soccer, boxing, golf, tennis, and fantasy — with recaps, power rankings, ticket-pricing reports, the “Sports Court” opinion column, and team and player directories.
William Horschak is listed among the site’s top writers, with 1,698,163 career reader views across 53 published stories — a body of work carried forward from the original era into the revived publication.
The relaunch preserves the lineage rather than erasing it. The archived editorial works remain © The Sports Jury, LLC, a Wisconsin LLC, while the live site publishes under The Sports Judge.
The revival is more than nostalgia. Reviving the venture meant reconstructing a publication from archived pages, standing the site back up, and resuming the editorial engine that made it work the first time — the same end-to-end ownership of systems, writers, and audience that defined the original.
That through-line — building and operating something online end to end — connects The Sports Judge to William’s current web ventures in hospitality revenue intelligence, civic transparency, and legal software.
Reach & Readership
A working byline, measured in readers
The clearest measure of a contributor platform is the readership it earns its writers. On The Sports Judge, William Horschak's body of work spans dozens of stories and well over a million reader views — the live continuation of an audience the original site built from roughly 2008 to 2014.
- A top-writer byline carried from The Sports Jury into the revived publication.
- Coverage across the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college sports, MMA, soccer, and more.
- Recaps, power rankings, ticket-pricing reports, and the “Sports Court” opinion column.
- A contributor model where writers build a byline and reach readers directly.
- An audience that, at the original site’s peak, reached 500,000 unique visitors.
~1.7M
Career reader views
William Horschak's total on The Sports Judge.
53
Published stories
William Horschak's byline on the site.
500K
Unique visitors at peak
At the original site's peak, circa 2008–2014.
The Origin Story
“Bleacher Report before Bleacher Report”
Long before the revival, William Horschak started TheSportsJury.com (circa 2008–2014) with friends from the FTJ Sports Forum — a tight circle of sports fans who wanted a place of their own to publish.
As the site caught on, it grew well beyond that original group into a contributor-driven publication. William describes it as “Bleacher Report before Bleacher Report” — an open platform where sports writers could publish, build a byline, and reach readers without waiting for a traditional media gatekeeper. The contributor model was the core of the site: recruit capable writers, give them a clear editorial lane, and keep the publishing engine running on a steady cadence.
In the early 2010s, several writers connected to the project made appearances or had work featured through SportsIllustrated.com — a meaningful marker for an independent site operating outside the established sports-media ecosystem. For the writers, The Sports Jury was a working byline and a proving ground; for William, their reach validated the model: recruit well, edit consistently, publish reliably, and the platform lifts the people on it.
The original venture operated under The Sports Jury, LLC, a Wisconsin LLC, whose archived editorial works remain under its copyright — the foundation the revived The Sports Judge builds on today.
What It Taught
The first venture — and a durable foundation
The Sports Jury was where William Horschak first learned to build and operate things online. Its value is what it established years before that skill set became central to his later work — fluency now visible again in the revived publication and in his current ventures.
Lesson
Web Publishing
Hands-on site administration, publishing workflows, and content operations learned by doing rather than delegating.
Lesson
Audience Development
Growing traffic deliberately — letting the analytics show what readers returned for and building a cadence that earns the habit.
Lesson
Managing Contributors
Coordinating creative people toward a shared standard — recruiting, editing, and keeping a distributed roster productive.
Those lessons carried forward. The systems thinking and operational ownership reappeared in William’s hospitality work — PMS-based systems, revenue discipline, team coordination — and the instinct for organizing information into usable online products now informs his current web ventures in civic transparency, hospitality revenue intelligence, and legal software — the same fluency that let him bring The Sports Judge back to life.
Professional inquiries
William is available for professional inquiries related to hospitality revenue strategy, open-records research, civic-transparency tools, web ventures, and business-development concepts.