Walter Cherepinsky never expected that a website he created in high school would become the main focus of his career. His passion for football and writing has led to his site becoming more successful than he ever could have imagined.
Cherepinsky is the owner and creator of walterfootball.com, a popular website that covers all things football. He began the site back in 1999, during his senior year of high school. Originally, he had created it for an Internet class that he was taking, but it has blossomed into one of the more respected sources for football knowledge on the Web. Today, his website is very popular and it has garnered as many as forty million views in a single month.
Growing up in northeast Philadelphia, Cherepinsky was active as a child. An avid swimmer, he started competing in swim meets when he was just ten years old, and continued to participate in them throughout high school and college. He had a good relationship with his parents and sister, and he said that they always supported him.
What got Cherepinsky interested in football was actually a competition at a sports cards store he and his father would frequently visit. The store had a football pool that people could enter to try and win a free box of cards. “I entered it one week the first time I ever did it and I won,” said Cherepinsky, “It was against the spread picking and I went 12 and 4. That kind of hooked me.” From there, at age 15, he started to watch more and more football and he really fell in love with picking the games.
Cherepinsky did not always know what he wanted to do during his life. In fact, he actually ended up switching his major to journalism during the spring semester of his fourth year at Penn State University. The night that really convinced him he needed to do something he loved was when he was working on a computer science project, “We spent the entire night trying to code something that I had no idea what to do and I was way behind my partners.” The group worked until the sun rose at 6:30 the next day and they still were not finished.
“I was just so miserable doing this, and I was like man I have to do something I like,” said Cherepinsky about the night. The next day, he decided to drop the class and become a journalism major. He did not know what he was going to do in writing, but he thought he could “cover a team for a newspaper” and “use his website as a résumé.” Little did he know what was in store for his site.
Over time as he focused more and more on the site, viewership for walterfootball.com continued to increase. “It grew incrementally,” said Cherepinsky, “but I never thought it could be a big website.” What helped to further jumpstart the growth of the website occurred in the summer of 2007. Cherepinsky, who at the time was sick with mono, was reading various materials on his laptop when he found some tips on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Said Cherepinsky, “I spent the entire summer of ’07 [implementing the tips on SEO] and the site traffic just exploded after that.”
As the popularity of his site grew, so did the number of employees he had. In 2011, he hired Charlie Campbell to help with NFL and college football coverage after a two hour long phone interview, and Cherepinsky referred to his work as “amazing.” In addition to Campbell, Cherepinsky also recently added fantasy expert Chet Gresham to his team along with former ESPN employee Pat Yasinskas to help produce more content for the site.
In a typical week during football season, Cherepinsky spends roughly 80 hours updating his site, reading about football, watching games, and producing content. He produces weekly power rankings, fantasy football rankings, fantasy football injury reports, game recaps, and game picks, which are his favorite thing to write about because he “still likes trying to figure out what’s going to happen.” During the offseason, he works about 65 to 70 hours a week producing mock drafts, news about free agency, and much more.
Cherepinsky has not had a full day off since May of 2009, but it does not matter to him, as he does not consider what he does to be work. He called what he does “fun” and said that he used to do this during his free time.
“If you do what you like, it’s not going to seem like work, and I think you’ll be more successful at it because you’re going to want to work.”
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