On 31 October 2002 while everyone else was out celebrating Halloween, I was launching this website. Back then it opened under the name belfastgiants.net and was a source for me to write about the Giants, report on games and host various stats that at times were not available on the official website. I was also studying web design and so this gave me a site with which to experiment with and in turn lead to various face lifts of the site.

By the end of the 2005/06 season I felt that the site needed to go in a different direction with a different end goal rather than the bog standard news and information site which the official site was beginning to provide on a better basis anyway. Something that didn’t exist was a site dedicated to the history of the Belfast Giants which by the summer of 2006 was six years old and expanding fast. There had been memorable moments to record, milestone statistics and this was a chance to put everything in one place for the fan to access. I put it together that season though the work in progress element of gathering the history and adding features continues to this day and perhaps always will while the Giants exist and I can think of things worth recording. Of course, as a fan of the club and with plenty of my mind, I kept a blog side to the site with writings on current affairs, player news, league news, thoughts, articles, milestone moments and historical stories which kept me busy and sucked into the Giants machine each and ever season.

in August 2008 though I resigned my season ticket and immigrated to Canada and the heartland of hockey itself – Southern Ontario. Now while I was no longer a Giants fan in the seats week in week out, I was still a fan and would, when I could watch games online and write whatever opinion pieces I could to the blog on what I was seeing, hearing and being told from various fans. I continued to keep the history side of the site uptodate with regards to all-time stats, records and achievements as well as info on the current season. Going through the 2009/10 season though this became a bit of a slog due to so many other things going on. The 09/10 season was my first ever year that I didn’t see a single Giants game live in person and as it turned out I only managed to catch a handful of games on the webcast – though I was back in Northern Ireland in time to watch the boys win their second ever playoff championship live on Sky Sports. Due to this lack of available time to watch games and cover them on here I couldn’t write about the team in depth and so blogs became fewer and the time between current season stat updates, and historical stat updates became bigger.

So with that in mind in the barren months between one season and the next, namely the summer of 2010 in this case, I have decided to ring in a few changes at Giants-History.com

Firstly, I’ll no longer be running a ‘current season’ section of the site with up to the date stats, standings and fixtures. If you want that you’ll just have to go to the official site, though you’ve probably been doing that for a long time now anyway – the official site really is a well oiled machine these days.

Secondly, I’ll more than likely only update things like all-time player stats and all-time goalie stats on a random basis and potentially even on a season by season basis once all games for a season are complete and all stats logged. If major milestone moments take place or some kind of individual player record is set or team record for that matter, I’ll do my best to get on asap to update the record.

Thirdly, I have decided to archive up all writings from this day back under the category 2003-2010 Blog of which 531 individual articles can be found which in its own way is the most in depth source of history on the site. The blog format has allowed it to take an almost diary set-up which was the aim when I converted the site from just a news website to an actual blog a few years back. There has been no re-writing as that would cheat the basic concept of the blog section of the site. A lot of it is nothing more than one fans opinion of what he seen while following the Belfast Giants from the stands of the Odyssey, and at times, the stands of other arena’s. From an eye in the eye of the Giants hurricane, if you will, and never with the luxury of hindsight. So take it as a fans diary of his time following the team on a week-to-week basis. What I want to do by leaving the blog in place is preserve a look at what the Giants were like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into the history of the team. The diary of following the Giants and what was going on is in itself my own part of their history.

Fourthly, I can’t give up the writing on the team altogether. I certainly can’t give up being a fan. I may be in the hockey hot-bed of the universe, but I feel a long way from the team I truly love and have yet to find an adequate replacement and am not sure I properly ever will so I will continue to write stories about the teams history and give some opinions of what I do manage to follow as little editorials but with no set time-frame of entry or commitment to updating regularly.

Finally, and the blog part aside, I didn’t want to delete the site entirely, I have spent way to much time and effort putting this database of statistics of the clubs history together just to zap it all now and I will enjoy keeping it up-to-date on a year-by-year basis at the very least. I did consider leaving the site up as a historic guide to the first ten years of the Belfast Giants, but I know I won’t be able to help myself from mentioning and updating some milestone that will no doubt come along after the ten year mark which we hover around right now. The current information on the site will remain available for all Giants fans to refer to and enjoy with the only real change being the frequency of updates and just periodic ramblings from myself as I do my best to keep tabs on my beloved Belfast Giants.

If anyone has any thoughts, questions or ideas for the site going forward then please feel free to get in touch and let me know via e-mail at, editorial@giants-history.com

Cheers,

Ricky
5/7/2010