30 years of Carolina Sportsman

Our first magazine hit newsstands in 1993

This year we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Sportsman in the Carolinas. Dating back to 1993, our first issue of North Carolina Sportsman hit newsstands. In 2006, South Carolina Sportsman joined the team. Then in late 2016, we merged the two magazines together, forming Carolina Sportsman.

We’ve certainly enjoyed the ride so far, and hope you have too. Along the way, we’ve written about many of our readers, published photos from many more, and have met many of you at boat shows and other outdoor expos.

Throughout our 30 years, we’ve prided ourselves on providing our readers with the where-when-how of all things outdoors, and we’ve kept our focus right here at home, in the Carolinas. Our writers live in the Carolinas, hunt and fish in the Carolinas, and that’s what we write about.

We keep it local

When I was a kid, I read all the outdoor publications I could get my hands on. This meant mostly national magazines like Outdoor Life and Field and Stream. I enjoyed them, but what I really longed for was a magazine that focused on places that I had access to all year long. I wanted to read about catching stripers at the Santee Cooper lakes, hunting bears in eastern North Carolina, catching smallmouth on the New River, shooting squirrels in the Francis Marion National Forest and fishing from the beaches along the Outer Banks.

Luckily, such a magazine came along in my lifetime, and even more luckily, I’ve had the pleasure of working for Carolina Sportsman, first as a freelancer for both South Carolina Sportsman and North Carolina Sportsman, then as website editor of both websites, then for the combined website, and for the past year or so, as editor of the magazine as well.

Many changes have occurred in the past 3 decades. The internet, still relatively an infant when our first magazine was printed, has exploded. But we didn’t let it pass us by. We got onboard, and watched our reach expand with our website, which we update with fresh content every day. We regret that only a fraction of our website content can fit in the magazine.

Social media has also grown by leaps and bounds in the past 30 years. Again, we jumped onboard and have continued to expand our reach through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

We’re looking forward to another 30 years and welcome any future changes that help us expand our reach even more.

Maybe you or a loved one were featured in one of our magazines from that first year, or from one of the early years. Or from the years in between. We’d love to share photos of them.

Feel free to email your favorites to images@carolinasportsman.com.