Evolution

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"Did you ever think The Stride Report would become this? Who would have thought that it would become what it is today?"

Truthfully, I always did.

As I've said before, I always thought The Stride Report had the potential to be big, even when I was first starting out and the site could more accurately be described as a glamorized blog. Of course, part of that unfounded optimism was simply due to being a naive college kid.

Heck, I didn't even know what "big" looked like or meant in this context.

And yet, despite anticipating that The Stride Report would eventually reach it's current scale, I have to admit, our brand, our identity, our site, our content offerings -- none of that matches the vision that I once had for TSR back in 2017.

That, however, may be a good thing.

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My initial vision for The Stride Report was far more myopic than it is now.

When I first started, I wanted to write analytical feature pieces similar to what you would see on The Ringer...and that's about it.

Nowadays, we offer in-depth analysis, the most extensive rankings in our sport, pre-race predictions, news and headlines, transfer and recruiting articles, we have expanded to every NCAA division, have begun to offer NAIA analysis and even offer analysis on high school results as well!

All of that, of course, is reserved just to articles and pages found on our website.

In 2025, we introduced a Social Media Admin in Lauren Cawley who, along with great help from Luis Flores and, for a few months, Anna Petr, began to dramatically alter our social media presence.

On YouTube, our total channel subscribers rose 180% in 2025 compared to 2024. Our watch time rose 283% more and our total channel views rose by so much, that YouTube didn't even give us a specific metric other than >999%. This, in turn, has opened up a new form of revenue for us that makes it slightly easier to pursue new projects and areas of coverage (something you'll notice in 2025).

And Instagram? Well, the metrics don't go back far enough to properly measure, but we gained at least 10,000 new followers in less than a year and reached a month where we eclipsed over 10,000,000 views!

The Stride Report Podcast? Yep, that's grown too, enough so that we were able to partner with our friends at Bleav over the last few months! And TikTok? Well we barely used that platform until this past year, but roughly 5,500,000 views in 2025 isn't too shabby considering that we're still growing in that area.

Put simply, The Stride Report's brand and identity has seemingly evolved beyond just articles -- our audio and video space has grown extensively and is primed to be even more robust in 2026!

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Of course, none of that means that we're ignoring our actual writing and our website -- if anything, our promising growth in audio and video has allowed us to make new investments to our written coverage in 2026!

Whether that's introducing sprints analysis, placing greater focus on our NAIA space, producing more headline-based articles or further investing in our already-awesome D1, D2 and D3 teams, there hasn't been this much room to grow for our website in a handful of years.

Even so, challenges will arise, hard decisions will have to be made and not everything we try will work (or even be popular). When you have as many facets to our content offerings as The Stride Report does, scaling doesn't always look pretty.

But...isn't that how you evolve? Heck, isn't that how anyone and anything evolves? And in today's ever-changing landscape -- both within the NCAA and media in general -- evolving as a company and a brand feels necessary for survival.

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At the conclusion of 2023, as we prepared to enter 2024, I penned an open letter to our audience explaining that TSR as a company was still "Learning to be Aggressive." And while I knew what that meant, I would be lying if I said I entirely understood how I was going to implement that.

But as we enter 2026, the vision seems clearer and the path forward is more pronounced.

Maybe that's because most of our writers have shown far greater comfort in their roles and, as a result, their writing has improved in a major way. Maybe that's because our podcast continues to gain momentum and we now have the support of a partner in Bleav. Maybe that's because our social media channels have become dramatically stronger assets for us than they ever were before.

All of those things "could be" the reason why we're optimistic about 2026. But at the end of the day, none of this is possible if my mom remained our only reader like she did nearly a decade ago (hi mom).

It is all of you, our ever-growing audience and group of readers, who make The Stride Report so special and so worth it to build. The support, the investment in who we are -- that is the one aspect of our website that has evolved more than anything else, and it's only been for the better.

Thank you to everyone who continues to support us in what we're trying to do. We want to be the best, because you deserve the best. And our ongoing pursuit of that goal will never stop.

Cheers to a happy and healthy 2026.

Your loyal admin,

Garrett Zatlin

The Stride Report