Being a University of Houston Collector

Most of the traffic on this blog isn't from consistent readers. Most comes from search engine referrals about a specific player. That's fine with me because one of my goals is to promote the University of Houston.

But there is a whole card collecting blog world out there. One of the more popular card blogs and one of my favorites is Sports Cards Uncensored. A new experiment starting there is a card blog round table where several bloggers address the same topic from a slightly different perspective. I love the idea and here's my take on what it's like to collect my favorite team, the Houston Cougars.
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Hello. My name is David and I'm a University of Houston collector. Do I sound like someone confessing an unhealthy addiction? It's an addiction, it's not unhealthy, but it's a little outside the norm. It would be much easier to be something like a Dallas Cowboys collector (my favorite NFL team) or Elvin Hayes collector (probably my favorite player and UH athlete), but my passion is for the Houston Cougars.

Why do I collect Houston Cougars cards and blog about it? There are several reasons. One of my favorite is to learn more about the history of Houston athletics and its players. Blogging about these players and their cards lets readers, UH fans or not, become more aware of some of the great athletes in UH history.

There are so many ways to be a UH collector too. You can collect players in their college uniforms or as a pro. You can collect everything from new ultra rare high dollar Kevin Kolb cards to old overproduced with no monetary value Andre Ware cards. You can collect almost any sport from baseball to football to basketball to golf to track. You can collect a few cards of a wide variety of players or focus on a superstar with a huge selection of cards like Hakeem Olajuwon. You can collect vintage cards from the 50s, 60s, and 70s or recent releases. I dabble in a little of everything, but you can't go wrong whatever you choose.

UH collecting is definitely a niche hobby. That has both positive and negative implications. On the positive side, many of the players aren't in high demand so you don't have to pay premium prices. For newer products, wax busters may flip some of the "hits" on eBay rather than keeping them in their collection. That means it may be easier to collect those "hits" by purchasing on the secondary market instead of trying to get lucky busting wax.

On the negative side, it can be tough to bond with the rest of the collecting community. If I collect Cowboys cards and you collect Giants and we both bust wax, we can easily trade. If I collect Cougars and you collect Giants, you may not even know who is a Cougar making obvious trades more difficult. Plus there may not be enough Cougars to bust wax while there will always be enough Cowboys.

On the blogging front, I'll never have a huge following like the greatness of Wax Heaven or Sports Cards Uncensored. My visitor list will always be much smaller and my regular readers may be even fewer even if I was the greatest card blog writer on the web (which I'm not). But I consistently get 20-35 visitors a day which I honestly wasn't sure I'd get in a month when I started this thing.

So why do I collect UH? Why do I blog about UH cards? Not for money or fame because that's not going to happen. Not because it's cool because it's not. It's because I'm a fan.
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I want to thank everyone who took the time to read this especially if you're a first timer here because of the round table. Even if you're not a UH fan, you're always welcome here. I'd love for you to come back. I'd love for you to post comments. I'd love for you to send me an e-mail (cougarcards@yahoo.com). If you have a UH collection or collectible, I'd love for you to guest post or be a regular contributor. But even if you don't do any of those things, I'm still very happy that at least once you visited my humble little corner of the blogosphere.