If You Build It, They Will Come

 I think I have finished updating TCDB with my Iowa Connections for basketball now.  I say "I think" because I am constantly finding things I missed, and just writing this I remembered I need to look up Caitlin Clark ....... back, she's not in there yet.  I know I've seen the Sports Illustrated for Kids card online, but it has not made it to the database yet. Basketball Iowa Connections will fall under four categories...mostly.  There are some foreign league cards, 3x3 league cards, etc. that are scattered in here as well.  NBA players (Harrison Barnes, John Koncak, etc), WNBA players (Bridget Carlton, Michelle Edwards, etc),CBA players ( Nate Erdmann, Roy Marble, etc) and college basketball players and coaches (Lute Olsen, etc) make up a majority of the collection. I have 213 Iowa Connections currently in my spreadsheet, and of the 213, 171 of them have at least one card tracked in TCDB.  Ali Farokhmanesh is tracked in Beckett because of his Sports Illustr...

 So like most of you, I missed going to card shows in 2020.  Being able to dig through dime boxes and pulling random cards that someone thought of as worthless that is priceless to my collection is just awesome.  But like so much, COVID took it, and I was left scrambling. Well, off to Target to pick up some boxes....except there are none there.  Hobby boxes have skyrocketed as collectors chase those high priced signatures.  Where could I find cards? For my birthday, my brother sent me a flat rate box with my gift.  But it didn't fill the box, so he just filled it with a bunch of cards he didn't want anymore. I loved digging through those, as I found a bunch of stuff for my collection. So then, I found out that you can just buy boxes like this on eBay (of course).  A wide variety of cards can be found.  Baseball, football and basketball cover most of them.  Some are just a mix of whatever, some are boxes of "I just opened a ton of Bowman, so h...