Who Is Eaglesfan?
When I went into the VHL discord to ask for help in creating my player name, a few people I didn't recognize asked the dumbest question in the world, "Who is Eaglefan!?!?" - that's like asking who is Tom Brady or Lebron James. I am the best thing that has happened to the VHL since the fall of @boubabi. But in all seriousness, read this Hall of Fame article to learn more about who I am. I was once arguably the most active member of the league, as I was a back to back GM Continental Cup Champion with the Yukon Rush in the VHLM "Yukon 2 gud", I won a cup as gm of the Calgary Wranglers in S44 with goat goalie Hans Wingate @CowboyinAmerica. I also was a grader, created a lot of how to recruitment articles, put some ads up for us on twitter and youtube, and most importantly VHLM commish and BOG member for many seasons. My peak activity was more elite than Victor's, but he has far outlasted me. I will never be anywhere near that active again, but I will try to get myself invested in the league at least a little bit.
What Have I Been Up To?
I first joined the VHL with @Fire Tortorella (stupid name by the way) in 2011, in my freshman year of high school. During my high school and early college years I had such an abundance of free time, I was at the point that I would keep refreshing the VHL site at night, scroll over my opposing GMs names and see what threads they were looking at to see what player pages they were looking out to figure out what players my opposing GMs were trying to trade for and then negotiating with the other GM to try to get them first. While I always have had a good strategical mind, effort like that was why I was legitimately a pretty darn good GM. I will never get anywhere close to that active on the VHL again. I have now graduated college and unfortunately work a standard 9-5 job that while I like it fine enough, it's a big time suck. If I had the money I would absolutely retire tomorrow and never be bored a day in my life, as I found out during my recent 6 month stretch of unemployment last year. While I do actually still have a good amount of free time as I have minimal responsibilities (no woman and no family), I choose to prioritize it in other ways than spending hours on VHL. As any friend of family member will tell you I am a huge pickleball fanatic, as I play an average of 4 days a week and do competitive tournaments every few months. I also have been an avid player of the NHL video games for years, participating in a semi competitve Esports league called ITHL with @Fire Tortorella and some other family members that we have played for many years, in addition to playing in the extremely competitive League Gaming (LG), where I finally made my childhood dream of making it to the LGNHL last season. Those 2 hobbies on top of owning the sweetest and cutest dog in the world take up the majority of my time.
Why Am I Returning?
It's been years since I have actually been active in this league, but I have always stuck around in the discord and even had my welfare player "Free Gorlab" going for a few seasons. The main thing that got me to stick around is a longstanding relationship with some members of the league going on about a decade. People like @Victor who I got to meet in real life in London back in 2017 (how the heck was that 7 years ago already), and @Ahmawho is my weird friend who likes lizards and hates Helsinki, and @Gustav whose town of salem games also kept me lurking around. And many more members who I am not tagging. The main reason I recreated is because Flyersfan told me to and I jokingly told him to venmo me and he actually did and gave me $100 so now I feel like I had to recreate. I also think its fitting I am joining the Ottawa Lynx as that was my original team all the way back in 2011 and outside of the Yukon Rush they are definitely the greatest VHLM franchise out there.
Some Random VHL Memories
I realize at this point that I only need a few hundred more words to get to 1,000 to make this worth double, so let's take a trip down memory lane:
Back in the day on the original website, I don't even know how to describe it but let's say you wanted to bold certain text, italicize other text, and enlarge or color other text you had to follow a very specific coding string and do it in a certain order or the whole page would fall apart. Thank goodness the VHL has moved to the 2020s as it never would survive now if people had to deal with that. @Victormight be able to explain what I'm talking about better.
The VHL used to not have a discord for many of the early years. We used to all interact via forums and instead of private team locker rooms being on discord they were on forums. There was something nice about that, but I do agree that discord change has been for the better. Still, the kids today will never know what it was like. This is a completely random aside, but I grew up with no cell phone until 7th grade, and no smartphone until late high school. I used to just fill downtime say waiting in elevators just staring into space and thinking. Now if I have to wait in line for 5 seconds I am scrolling a TikTok.
There was a legendary thread created many years ago when @Willby random chance was dining at a restaurant @Jerichowas working at, and recognized his voice as his waiter after listening to many of Jericho's Pajodcasts. He gave us a live play by play of Jericho being a waiter and it was funny.