My name is Eva E. Adams, and I've spent the last decade turning my lifelong obsession with basketball into a career that still feels like play. I was born in Chicago in 1988, raised on the sound of squeaking sneakers and the roar of the United Center crowd every time the Bulls played. My dad had season tickets in the nosebleeds, and by age ten I could recite Michael Jordan's career stats faster than my multiplication tables.
I attended the University of Illinois, studying Marketing and graduating in 2010 with a senior thesis on how social media was changing fan engagement in the NBA. While my classmates were chasing internships at ad agencies, I cold-emailed every basketball blog I could find. That hustle landed me a part-time gig writing game recaps for a now-defunct site called HoopsHype. The pay was peanuts, but the byline was gold.
After graduation, I bounced around digital agencies in Chicago, cutting my teeth on campaigns for sneaker drops and fantasy-league apps. In 2015, I took the leap to a sports-tech startup that became large enough to get acquired, and suddenly found myself managing seven-figure budgets for March Madness activations. The work was thrilling, yet something was missing-the data. I'm a numbers nerd at heart; give me a spreadsheet of box scores, and I'll gladly disappear for hours.
That's how I found DatabaseBasketball.com in 2018. I'd been using their archive for years to settle bar bets and fuel late-night analytics rabbit holes. When I saw they were looking for a marketing lead to modernize the brand and grow the audience, I pitched myself hard. Three interviews and one obsessive 40-slide deck later, I was in.