By: Kathryn Fenstermacher

If you’ve spent any time on the Hartford City Happenings Facebook group, then you’ve likely come across “Tim – The Non-Sports Guy” putting in a good word for organizations, events, and eateries in and around Blackford County. But who is the real person behind this persona? No, he’s not employed by the government – or by anyone – to do this. The unofficial tour guide and biggest fan of Blackford County is none other than one volunteer, well-intentioned citizen: Tim Norris, Jr.

Norris is a long-time Blackford County resident whose connections to the region are strong. A true Facebook savant, he spends his free time finding, liking, and sharing anything going on within a convenient radius of Blackford County. Norris runs two informational Facebook pages, “Tim – The Non-Sports Guy” and “Blackford County Eats,” with the goal of connecting locals to the resources they may be looking for.

Our editor sat down with Norris for a Q&A about his Facebook persona, what motivates him, and what, on earth, Snoopy has to do with it . . .

K: Thanks for speaking with me, Tim. In a nutshell, how did “Tim – The Non-Sports Guy” get started?

T: Back in 2019, kind of during the heyday of the Luke Brown basketball phenom there in Blackford County, Steve Hurd bought a bunch of equipment and started a local sports broadcast. We were kind of coming into the COVID stuff when it really hit. It was just kind of a group of volunteers getting together, and the guys had approached the Sons of Amvets, which I volunteered with for quite a while, about making a donation for some of the equipment. At that time, we were kind of looking at some of the elderly gentlemen that played high school basketball or coached 20 years ago, and they just weren’t tech-savvy enough to access the YouTube. We started hosting watch parties there at the Amvets in Hartford City for the guys, so that’s kind of how I got involved with the Blackford Sports Network (BSN). The “Non-Sports Guy” page was really a spinoff of that to help promote their broadcasts as well as the watch parties that we were using to try to generate some interest and some business for the local veterans group.

K: Could you explain the name? What does “non-sports guy” mean?

T: I am not a sports guy, never really have been since like, T-ball, peewee football days. So, when I started interacting with these guys, like any other kind of niche, they have their own acronyms and their own terminology. So many times I had to be like, “Hey guys, listen, back it up and say that in plain English for the non-sports guy.” Some of the guys that were on the broadcast actually turned it into a little bit of a joke. So, after being announced over the internet with 1,000 viewers a few times as “Tim, the non-sports guy,” I kind of decided to embrace it. It’s taken a little hassle out of my posts because most folks don’t ask a lot of questions about batting averages or defensive whatchamacallits, because they know I’m not going to have the answer. I definitely try to support anything that has to do with youth athletics, even though I’m not a sports guy, because I think that’s something that is super important for the kids in our community, but also for the community itself. It’s a focus of civic pride. A few years ago, when they were packing the stands for every basketball game . . . it was not so much just about capturing the high school basketball spirit, but really about just kind of re-engaging a lot of people in the community that might have been disenfranchised or really kind of fell into some of the negative thoughts and feelings around the community that kind of persisted for the last couple decades.

K: That’s an interesting comment. As someone who’s had a history of being connected to the county, what is your feeling of the morale of the community?

T: I think in the last, probably, five years, there’s been some pretty radical changes in the attitudes of the community as a whole. I think we have some new business leaders, we have some new political leaders, and we just kind of have a lot of people that maybe in the past have felt disenfranchised, and through organizations like, well, Positively Blackford, Build a Better Blackford, I can go on and on . . . [the] Community Foundation should probably be at the top of that list, they do so much. I really think that the perception isn’t so much that there has been that much change, but a realization that there could be, and that there’s a lot of like-minded people out there. They’re looking for an opportunity, so that’s kind of what I’m doing: finding those opportunities that are in the community and then plugging citizens, businesses, organizations in. In a lot of cases, they just don’t know something like that already exists in our community. Homeschool groups, kid play date type things, adult craft time, respite care for caregivers, support groups for people that have lost loved ones, those are all things that happen all the time in Blackford County, and I’d say probably 80% or more of the community doesn’t even know those resources are available. 

K: So with what you’re trying to do in making these connections, how much time does this take up for you? 

T: Sure, so, I’m an amateur, and I’m a volunteer. I commit the time to it that I can. In the beginning, I probably spent a little bit more time on it. Now, it’s established enough that I actually have people sending things to me. Don Rogers Photography . . . he takes a lot of action photos, he’s at a lot of events, and he freely shares his art. I’ve got other folks that make sure that I get updates either through a message or just [by] tagging me in things. Facebook’s made some changes, [and] I can actually set up notifications from the things I don’t want to miss. A lot of it’s just a minute here or there to check my notifications, share the post. On the weekends, I try to do a little bit of a deep dive, looking at those pages that maybe don’t pop up the notifications as often. A lot of my inspiration comes from just conversations like you and I are having right now. And I always have a little joke, “It’s worth a Google.” It takes two seconds to type something into Google, and a lot of times you can answer somebody’s questions or maybe learn something new. So, a lot of my posts are something I didn’t know before – I learned it today, and now I’m sharing it with you. 

K: Honestly, that’s a lot more productive use of scrolling than most of us! I’m curious, what sort of response have you had from community members?

T: That’s actually a pretty interesting question. I’ve got a lot of great feedback, especially from business owners. Magic Corner, that’s a relatively new business in Hartford City, even being around a couple years now, there’s still a lot of people that don’t know they’re there or even what they do. Same thing with Thrifty Sounds, the thrift shop and record store downtown. Those are people that, as soon as they opened up, I was trying to get the word out . . . and they’ve re-engaged with me through some cross promotion, helping with some of the giveaways we put on. So from the business community, I’ve got a lot of positive feedback. At the last small business meeting at City Hall, Blackford County Economic Development put me on the resource list for marketing. I’m not charging anybody or anything like that, but [it’s] just another place that you can reach out to for a way to get the word out. The flip side of that, though, is three years into this I still only have 800 followers on Facebook. Some of our posts’ reach are 10s or more thousands of people, but it all starts with a pretty core group of only 800 followers. These people are sharing and engaging, putting it into groups or on their own page, so a lot of that audience that’s actually seeing my stuff isn’t seeing it on my page at all, they’re seeing it where you share it. 

K: Is it a goal of yours to increase your followers, or are you happy to just share it organically?

T: Absolutely! The organic group growth of the page is something that, from the beginning, I made a priority. Anybody can go online and launch a YouTube video and have 1,000 Facebook followers in a couple of days. But, what I’ve been allowed to do in the slow growth and organic growth of, not just the “Sports Guy” page but “Blackford County Eats,” is everybody there has a connection to at least one other person. And so I think that adds to the feeling of community. If you go on some of the groups, there’s just a lot of negativity in the comments. I don’t really have to deal with that, and I think a lot of that has to do with the way the audience was built. 

K: So tell me about the websites that you’re working on: how are those going to connect with what you’re already doing? How are they going to be different?

T: BlackfordDirectory.com is kind of my main focus right now. The “Sports Guy” page isn’t going to go away. Facebook is just such a simple, free, and easy way to quickly get information out, but a lot of people have kind of rejected social media, either for personal reasons or for privacy reasons. One of the main feedback that I’ve gotten from a lot of folks is, “We don’t have Facebook.” So what the Blackford Directory really is all about is finding all these resources that are, not just in the county, but I want to expand it to the zip codes that touch our county . . . the people that I think are kind of on the fringe, not just in those little communities outside of Blackford County, but the people that live in unincorporated Blackford County as well. This is going to be totally voluntary, anybody that chooses to participate in the database will be included for free, anybody that doesn’t want to will be excluded. I eventually want to offer some paid services there, but that’s not anything that’s in my purview in the next two years. I’m actually going to be taking some classes to kind of prepare me . . . so I’m looking at not even launching this until probably November or December of this year . . . and kind of seeing where it goes or evolves from there. One of the luxuries I have is that this isn’t my job, this isn’t my business. I can afford to fail. A lot of folks may be in a spot where, if they dedicated this much time and resources to something, they need to get something in return. What I’m trying to do here is set an example that in your free time, as a volunteer, you can make a contribution in minutes a day or minutes a week that really does something. If somebody else has a better mousetrap and they want to run the Blackford Directory, I will share everything I got, I’ll give them my URL tomorrow. But, nobody else is doing it, so I decided to do it.

K: And then you mentioned ShopBlackford.com. . . .

T: Yeah, ShopBlackford.com is going to be a complementary website to the Blackford Directory, and it’s going to be a little bit more focused on the businesses. I want the directory to encompass everyone: community groups, the non-profits, the churches, the businesses. But Shop Blackford is all about keeping money in Blackford County. Anybody that participates in the directory is going to have access to sharing on our Facebook page. Eventually, I would like to maybe create some subgroups within there to help business to business type transactions. That’s really something that’s almost still in the brainstorm phase, but I went ahead and created the webpage, the Facebook page, and a Twitter account to go along with both of those websites, partially because I’ve really never done that from scratch before. The other two websites are kind of a work in progress. 

K: What motivates you to do this for free, in your spare time? Why do you care so much?

T: Honestly, this is a distraction for me, this is how I blow off steam. I guess spreadsheets and computers are the last thing I should want to do when I get off work, but you know, it is a hobby. And I’m not going to promise that I’ll do it forever. When I started this, one of the very first posts I put on the “Sports Guy” page, and on “Blackford County Eats” as well, was, I’ll keep doing this as long as it’s fun. I’ve seen so many other page administrators quit. You’re probably familiar with Hartford City Happenings: over the years, we’ve had several groups like that . . . and the administrators quickly realize it can be pretty overwhelming. I give kudos to the folks that run that site, I definitely wouldn’t want to police a group like that, it’s just a lot of work. But you know, what I do is really a different animal, because any of the contributions that are made go through me before I post them, rather than they get posted in a group and have to be dealt with later. So for me, if I’ve got something planned with the grandkids for the weekend, and the “Sports Guy” doesn’t post for two days, the internet’s not going to fail, nobody’s going to miss their paycheck, and everybody’s going to have a peaceful sleep at night. So that takes the pressure and stress off of me. It really is just a hobby, I don’t know if I can explain why I do it. Why do people collect stamps? Why do people you know go to auto races? It’s just something that lets me stop worrying about some of the bigger problems in the world that I just can’t tackle.

K: Is there a significance to having Snoopy as your profile picture?

T: You know what, I can’t even tell you how many people have asked me that. Snoopy was a placeholder. When I started the “Sports Guy” page, the name was kind of a placeholder too. I didn’t really know where the page was going or what I was going to end up doing. The “sports guy” name was kind of given to me. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the classic joke about running for dog catcher, but I had several people in the community ask or try to encourage me to get involved in politics. I lived just about a mile and a half over the county line for several years (but we moved back to Hartford City about three years ago), so . . . it made it very easy for me to stay out of local politics. I couldn’t vote in Blackford County, I couldn’t run for office in Blackford County, so, as a volunteer with the Amvets and then later with BSN, I really felt like I could cross the lines. So, the old joke about running for dogcatcher: anytime somebody talks to me about getting involved with local politics, I tell them, “Well, maybe next year I’ll run for dogcatcher.” And there’s a classic Snoopy toy out there . . . with a sign on the side that says, “Snoopy for dogcatcher.” And that always stuck in my mind. The day I was making the Facebook page, I didn’t want to put my own picture on there because it’s not really about me, and I didn’t want to be associated with the school or the town or really even the county, I wanted something independent. And for the five or six or seven people that got that joke, it was a pretty funny inside joke. Until I get a logo or something more inspiring . . . Snoopy’s just kind of become my mascot. I lost my dog last year, the only dog I ever really . . . thought the world of, and I always kind of thought that my dog was Snoopy and I was Charlie Brown. She was smart, she was a step ahead of me, and I was just the regular guy living in my dog’s world. And sometimes I think we all feel that way, you know? We’re just punching the clock, we’re doing our day to day. None of us are going to end world hunger or [achieve] world peace, but maybe we’ll help promote the fundraiser that gets a new roof put on a church.

K: Do you have anything else to add?

T: For me personally, I really want to thank Steve Hurd and Blackford Sports Network. If it wasn’t for them, there would be no “Tim – The Non-Sports Guy,” none of this would have ever started. Also, Chris Landis of C&T Media and the Peanut Gallery Interviews – I helped edit those for a while, and that kind of helped with the evolution past the live broadcast. Chris interviewed a lot of Blackford alumni, and editing and sharing his videos probably helped grow my audience more than anything. And Allen Johnson with ADM Custom Creations. I actually worked with Al through the Sons of Amvets, he donated a lot to our local fundraisers. Again, a lot of my involvement with the community, becoming familiar with these organizations and people, probably wouldn’t have happened without Al Johnson and his support and his encouragement through all of this.