I lost my business due to COVID 2 years ago — and then found my sports journalism passion

On Sunday, March 15, 2020, I carefully crafted a post for Facebook and for a sign to print on the door of our business.

"In the interest of being the best neighbors possible..." it began, and I wrote that given the news and the virus that was rapidly spreading across the country — which had forced the suspension of the NBA season a few days earlier, among other things — we'd be closing for the next two weeks.

We never re-opened.

As I write this, the United States is creeping toward 1 million COVID-19 deaths, a staggering number that it seems we've all grown numb to, particularly given that about 23 months ago even 100,000 was frightening and unacceptable.

My immediate family has thankfully been good in terms of health, though a loved one lost his father and other friends and associates were sick from the disease.

There's certainly no comparison to loss of life, yet all of us have lost something, often more than one thing. Students lost multiple athletics seasons or a chance at prom or a traditional graduation. Maybe your favorite takeout place couldn't survive or your wedding had to be seriously pared down or you had to give birth in a hospital without your significant other to comfort you.

Maybe you lost your business, like my husband Marcus and I lost ours. Though in a weird way, it might have been for the best for us.

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Let's back up a bit. In 2019 I'd grown restless with my work. I loved working at Yahoo Sports, as it provided me a decent income when I decided to leave the Boston Globe after the birth of our third daughter a few years earlier. I'd grown weary of the grind of being a New England Patriots beat writer after almost a decade, and when our second and third girls came in less than 18 months, I left.

Fortunately for me, I wasn't without a job for long, as Yahoo hired me as an NFL blogger. It allowed me to work from home with our little ones and the flexibility to watch my older daughter's school events.

But by the time our youngest was preparing to start school, spending most of my work hours aggregating the latest roster transactions had gotten boring. Surveying the sports journalism landscape wasn't encouraging; I had no interest of returning to beat reporting again nor uprooting our oldest midway through high school or having my husband leave a job he enjoys, and there didn't seem to be many other options.

So I settled on an idea: The younger girls had loved visiting an indoor playground about 30 minutes from our house, but there was only one within Boston city limits, meaning there was certainly room for a second. It seemed like a foolproof business idea given the weather situation eight months out of the year here. And when I discovered that the one in Boston was for sale, it just seemed like kismet.

I emptied my seriously modest 401(k) to buy Kids Fun Stop, which had been operating for about 15 years, and after a couple of weeks for a new paint job and some other minor fixes, we opened as new owners on Sept. 4, 2019. It was a roughly 4,000-square foot space with play structures you'd usually find at your local park, but inside was featured a tall spiral slide, a fire truck on massive springs for pretend play and a climbing cave. It also had a huge playhouse, big enough that even at almost 5-foot-10 I could stand upright.

Open play was available every day for a modest fee, but the business was really sustained off private birthday parties, when families could rent out the whole facility for two hours.

The truth is, I thought I was going to leave journalism entirely. Even though it was the only thing I'd ever done, I couldn't see a path to stay in the business and stay where my family was geographically. But my husband and I struck a deal: I had to keep writing for Yahoo for a year, until we got a sense of how much money I'd be able to pay myself and if it would be enough that it wouldn't hurt us financially.

That's what I did for those first months. I packed my laptop every day and wrote from the old metal desk that had been left behind, writing blog posts in between fielding phone calls and emails and tending to the needs of kids and caregivers who were visiting for some play time. I was at KFS almost 10 hours a day, six days a week, and Marcus was there on Sundays because I had to be home for to write on NFL game day.

As any small business owners can attest, it was hard. Working seven days a week, even when it's for yourself, isn't easy. And even if writing isn't physically strenuous, I was working two full-time jobs.

We were doing pretty well financially, bringing in more than the previous owner had, in part because word got out among local nannies that we had bought new toys and were serious about keeping everything clean. Little people like to put their mouths on everything.

I couldn't quite figure out if I loved KFS. Parts of it I really did — pulling up in the mornings and unlocking the door to our business offered a thrill, and getting to know families that became regulars was enjoyable. One family had young twins and I'd see them as much as three times a week, with their nanny on weekdays and their parents on weekends. I watched them quickly go from hesitant walkers to runners in a matter of months. I had a mini-dance party with one child during his first visit, so therefore we had to have one every time he came.

The other stuff? It was a mixed bag. Birthday parties could be fun but some parents were pills, and it was a fight to get some people to follow our basic rules. Everyone had to take their shoes off, and no food on the play floor. Trying to scrub cake frosting out of those floor tiles was close to impossible. It felt like I was always buying something, whether more snacks to sell or boxes of toilet paper or a big expense like new chairs for the party rooms.

Remember, I thought I had one foot out the door when it came to my media career. And yet, when I got a call on Christmas Eve that year telling me that because of a new California law, AB5, going into effect in the new year and my status as a full-time freelancer I'd likely be losing my job with Yahoo, something in me said nope.

It wasn't time to leave journalism, not yet.

Armed with a little bit of knowledge — namely, that the few columns I had written to that point were well-received by the higher-ups — I summoned all of my courage and emailed Yahoo Sports' editor-in-chief and asked if he'd let me try being a columnist. I laid out myriad reasons why I thought I was perfect for the role, not the least of which was at that time there wasn't another Black woman in North America who was a daily sports columnist and that just couldn't be.

He said yes.

Three weeks before I put that yellow sign on the door at Kids Fun Stop announcing we'd be closing for a little bit until this virus died down, I wrote my first column with my new title.

I loved it. I still love it.

Marcus and I ultimately decided to close KFS for good in July 2020 because there were too many unknowns. The city of Boston was nowhere close to letting businesses in the category we were in open again. And when it did give the green light, we didn't know when or if families would feel comfortable returning; many of the caregivers we saw during the week were grandparents and therefore squarely in the population at highest risk if they got COVID, and they might never return. Back then, obsessively cleaning surfaces was thought to be necessary, and that was timely and expensive. We were months from a vaccine.

It was heartbreaking to close, but comforting knowing it wasn't because of anything we did. It wasn't our failure, it was a once-in-a-century pandemic.

We were out a not-small amount of money since we'd invested my retirement account, but it certainly could have been worse. So many have lost so much more.

Yet in the midst of all of it, I found my true passion as a journalist. It only took 20-plus years and almost losing my job, but I got there.