The man behind the camera

MAT-SU — Who is the face behind the lens of MatSuSports.net? The man who volunteers his own time to entertain the Valley athletes?

Many of you have either seen or heard of the guy behind the one of the most popular Valley sports websites. His name is Bruce Eggleston. Bruce is a Valley supporter through and through. He is a Wasilla High School alumnus. Bruce raised his own kids here in the Valley, who have since graduated from Houston High School. Sports are his passion, working at JBER full time.

In 2004, Bruce needed to do some research on cameras for his job. In doing so he decided to buy one of his own. To familiarize himself with it more he attended a Houston High hockey game at the suggestion of a friend. While there, the coach asked him if he would take pictures of the team.

“I thought he just wanted a picture of the team on the ice or something, but he wanted me to sit on the bench with the team and take pictures of the team during the game,” Bruce said.

Bruce started photographing sports events more often and eventually uploaded them on a website called HawkSports. When Houston went 4A, the school’s sports programs began playing more Valley teams. During a hockey game against Wasilla, a player from WHS asked if he would take some photos of him for his Myspace page. Bruce gladly obliged. Afterwards, Bruce went to tell the WHS player where he could find the pictures online, but was surprised to find that he already knew. Word had gotten around of where rival teams that played Houston could find their photos.

Soon after, Bruce started adding pictures of other sports and teams and changed the site name to what it is currently known as, MatSuSports.net.

On a trip back from Fairbanks with the Houston hockey team, Bruce was sorting through pictures of the game on his laptop. He usually chose between 60 to 70 photos of each game when he only was taking pictures for Houston High, deleting the blurry ones, ones with an official in the way and just less action-based photos. Then the players started gathering around him complimenting on photos of themselves.

“Any picture of you is a good picture,” Bruce said he realized.

The amount of pictures he uploaded after that changed. He now adds almost all of them, minus the defaults, to Matsusports.net, about 20 of which get posted as a preview on Facebook. Bruce himself has about 665 friends on his personal page, but about 1,933 followers on his MatSuSports Facebook page.

Bruce attends any Valley game that he can go to. The hard question for him is what to do when there’s more than one event. He usually sets big tournaments such as state and regions as a first priority. Senior nights usually fall second after that. Valley schools come above everything else. He tries not to favor one team too much, and many times he just decides on the way there. Bruce’s biggest problem is knowing about them in the first place.

“A lot of times I just sit at home and think, ‘I really wish I had a game to go to,’” he said.

Bruce makes no money off the website, nor does he want any. He knows how much it means to the youth of the Valley to see them and to have them. He hopes that more people will start to take pictures and eventually submit their own of their teams onto the site.

“The youth are the reason I do this,” Bruce said.

Ryker Steiner is a Journalism student at Wasilla High School.