The Sabre Announces New Ownership Ahead Of 25th Anniversary

In a little more than 30 days, TheSabre.com will begin celebrating its 25th Anniversary year. Originally VirginiaFootball.com and VirginiaBasketball.com, the site officially became a business and adopted its new name in 1998.

I am pleased to announce that the site will hit that milestone under new ownership. A group with two University of Virginia alumni, including myself, purchased the site earlier this month. Considering that I started writing for the site’s newsletters as a student in its early days, this is an exciting time and an amazing opportunity for me personally. While we will continue to employ SportsWar as our hosting service, this makes TheSabre.com a fully independent site once again.

In order for TheSabre.com’s future to be as bright as its past, we will need the support of fans more than ever.

What Can You Do?

While maintaining a strong community and dedicated user base, the site has lost subscribers and experienced variations in advertising. That translates to lost revenue. To provide some context, while site visitation remains high and fans remain dedicated to the site and its community, subscribership has dropped by more than 1,000 subscribers over time. At our current price point, that’s six figures in lost revenue in a given year. The site has been able to sustain itself and continue to offer free services like the message boards, NewsLink, and more, but has also incurred personnel reductions and faced other tough budget decisions. Simply put, the decline has impacted operating capabilities.

A site with our history and dedicated fan interest can offer so much more with financial backing. That can include expanded personnel, supporting the Virginia Athletics Foundation, offering charity assistance beyond subscription donations, housing greater and more diverse content offerings, reintroducing apparel and fan gear/memorabilia, and Name, Image, and Likeness connections.

Ultimately, there are four main ways that you can support the site financially to help us cover the purchase expense and to increase available funds in order to grow TheSabre.com fan experience.

Subscribe

There obviously are a lot of options for entertainment on a subscription basis and not everyone has time to read or consume UVA sports driven content all the time. However, the simple investment of subscribing to the site gives you access to our content and even if you can’t or don’t want to read/watch/listen to it all, it ALSO supports free areas of the site, the overall budget, and the site additions of the future. You can subscribe here.

Gift Subscriptions

Know a Virginia fan? Give them the gift of a subscription. It directly supports the site and gives them 365 days of UVA connected entertainment. You can do this easily and quickly through the site by clicking on this link. Just let us know when to send out the gift email and we’ll take care of the rest.

Remove ad blockers and use affiliate links

The site gains money any time an advertisement loads so allowing those ads to appear supports the site directly. Also, we have affiliate deals set up with Fanatics for fan gear and can receive a paid percentage on any purchase you make as long as you click through the links from our site. We may set up other affiliate deals in the future as well. Support those efforts and you support the site directly. Shop Fanatics and support the site today!

Friends Of The Sabre

We mentioned this as a possibility earlier this year, but the idea was tabled by previous ownership. We are immediately launching the ability to simply support the site through donations. If you don’t have time for the content, but love the message boards, the conversations, the community, the information resources, our social media, and more, then this would be an easy and effective way to support those efforts.

Any and all donations help and this will be set up as a recurring gift option. Members can cancel at any time. For this first run of Friends Of The Sabre, we may offer reward incentives such as a badge or other message board perks. Supporters in the upper tiers of this program may also receive invitations to Sabre specific events or NIL opportunities.

To Join Friends Of The Sabre, click here.

What’s Next?

Fans have always generously stepped forward when the site needed support. Whether that was the near beginning when original site creator Mike Ingalls asked for help establishing a new server for the site’s needed bandwidth or more recently with lifetime subscription purchases, fans have always been there to help keep this community growing. We believe that you will support this exciting time in the site’s history too. Celebrating 25 years, after all, is happening all because of you.

In preparation for the upcoming anniversary year, the site already began to expand its coverage and offerings. We brought back JHoo as a contributor on a periodic basis this past year. We added new features such as “The Best” series, RaleighHOO’s Bracketology, and SabreBetrics. We also partnered with a new podcast “Preferred Walk-ons” that we hope is the beginning of a Sabre podcast network.

This year, we also restarted an internship program through the site with multiple students gaining valuable work experience and providing expanded content offerings for fans. We would like to keep that program going, and make it a paid opportunity in the future so your support would help greatly there. We have other ideas in the works as well and will be asking fans what content elements they’d like to see either revived or created.

Today, in conjunction with this new ownership announcement, we are also excited to announce a new partnership with the Hook Sports Marketing Group. We have seen Hoo fans’ concerns for UVA’s place in the NIL marketplace on our message boards and want to be an active part of the solution.

The Sabre and HSM will work together to promote opportunities for Virginia student-athletes. The partnership will include specific Sabre-driven content and apparel/other options. The first opportunity connected with this will be introduced in the near future. The Sabre will provide advertising and marketing support for the 4819 Club (join today), student-athlete clinic offerings, and other events.

In short, while we have been part of the fabric of the Virginia fan experience over the last 25+ years, this really could be just the beginning. We look forward to celebrating the anniversary and the future with you.

Go Hoos!