It's with great pleasure that I welcome you to the brand new fan blog in support of DC United: Black And Red United.

I say fan blog because it is specifically designed to be more of a community than a one-sided blog.  It's for DCU fans, by DCU fans.  Switching over to SBNation means that the blog will be more interactive.  Check out the FanShots and FanPosts sections on the right.  These areas give you another opportunity to join in the discussion.  The FanShots area allows you to post your own pictures, videos, quotes, or links, and the FanPosts area allows you to post your own original thoughts in a sort of guest-blog form.  So please feel free to join in the discussion, and if I like what you post, I can even promote it to the front page.

Let me take a quick step back though and introduce myself to any newcomers.  This is your old pal Shatz, and I've been blogging about DC United over on the DCUMD blog for almost three years, and I've been attending United matches since 1996.  I'm also an alumnus of the University of Maryland, and that will show through in my incredibly biased lobbying for United to acquire any former Terp players.

To my loyal DCUMD readers, you'll be seeing some changes, but mostly only in the format, and hopefully all for the better.  Even though the blog is now part of a larger network, the content will remain largely the same.  And I will be carrying over all my favorite features/gimmicks (the Benny Awards, River or Life, the ADRs, the Sixths, etc).  SBNation would not have asked me to join if they didn't like what I was doing, so I won't be changing very much about what I do.

So thanks for stopping by, and I hope that you'll return.  In the mean time though, take a look around at some of the other blogs in the network, like Daily Soccer Fix, Sounder at Heart, and RSL Soapbox on the soccer side, as well as some other local sports blogs like Hogs Haven, Japers' Rink, Federal Baseball, Bullets Forever, and Testudo Times.