Welcome to HometownCollector.com.
I'm Matt, and this site is a basically my chronicling my hobby of sports card collecting. As the title suggests I collect my home town teams. Being from central Massachusetts, my focus includes the Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots, Boston Celtics, & Boston Bruins. I also collect athletes from my hometown of Worcester, MA including but not limited to Demarr Langford Jr. and Makai Ashton-Langford, the sons of a good friend of mine. Mike Bradley, a Burncoat High School Legend. Although I am a North High Polar Bear through and through. Former Chicago Bear, Jerry Azumah. And so many other. I also have been collecting Bo Jackson cards since the late 1980's and are pretty much the only cards that I have had since I was a kid.
I collected pretty hard core from 1987 thru about 1992 ,when as happens with most high school kids, I developed other interests. Through a series of unfortunate events in the mid 1990's I lost almost my entire collection to thieves. Aside from the previously mentioned Bo Jackson cards and about a dozen other cards that were never far from my side including a 1987 Fleer Barry Bonds rookie, a 1989 Score Barry Sanders rookie and a few others that I deemed worthy of a secret box hidden in a chest full of clothes and other crap.
That was the end of my card collecting until 2014. I did what most people do as the get older. I got married, had a child, bought a house and had a pretty good job. My wife and I bought a house in the small town she grew up in. The town had a card shop that has been around since the 1990's. Every day for 5 years I drove by the card shop twice a day on my way to and from work never giving it a second thought. Then one day in 2014 I had the weird urge to stop in. It felt so familiar even though I had never been there before. I talked to the owner for a bit and left with a hobby box a 2014 Topps Football. I got it home a ripped it open enjoying ever second of it. That's it I was hooked. for the next few years I hit the hobby hard. I was ripping boxes all the time, not really chasing the hits but more enjoying building the sets like I did as a kid. I also started buying other peoples collections, mostly junk wax era stuff, which i actually preferred as it was more reminiscent of childhood. After a few years I got frustrated with how over saturated the market was with different sets. Did we really need 20 different Panini Football sets per year? So I made a conscious effort to limit my collecting to just cards I cared about. That is when I decided to focus on just the players from my hometown teams and a few others. I still love set build though so I do have a few I am working on, a 2016 Topps Football Master Set with all base inserts, autos and photo variations, a 2014 Leaf Trinity Football set, and a 1964 Topps Baseball set. When those are done maybe I will pick a new set.
Anyway, that is a bit about me and how I got to where I am. And this site will chronical where I am going and how I am getting there.