About Mr. Doug Van Sant

I rarely have any free time, so let me give you some details on how I stay busy. My biggest passion is photography. I spend most of my evenings and weekends shooting photos of some of the worlds top DJs and enjoy traveling the 50 states to capture sights from our many great cities. My second biggest passion is dancing lindy hop. I spend several nights a week either social dancing, teaching or traveling to competitions and exchanges around the country.

I also enjoy working out 4 or 5 times a week and seem to have taken to running. I'm not signing up for any marathons just yet, but I do enjoy taking part in various 5 and 10Ks throughout DC. After all that, I try to get to as many sporting events as possible and update this fancy little web site you're currently taking a peek at.

So how did we get to this point you ask? Let me start from the beginning. Just after the American revolution, I was a young lad. Just kidding! Seriously folks, I was born a mere 4.4 lbs on August 28th, 1974 to Doug and Linda Van Sant in Dover, Delaware. I'm the only child and spent the better part of my youth playing with toy cars, GI Joe and riding BMX bikes. I went to catholic school for several years and did the ole switch to public school after getting tired of wearing a tie to class. As I grew up, I went through the break-dancing stage, the skateboarder stage and followed with the freestyle-BMX stage. Had it not been for my beautifully tricked out bike getting stolen, I may have gone pro. Ah to dream...I only reached local sponsorship after talking a bike shop owner into the fact he needed bicycle trick shows to draw in customers. Never thought a teenage bike-rat could know a thing or two about marketing eh!

So After I grew out of the bike/skate lifestyle, I turned my focus to drums. I did the band geek thing and immersed myself in high school band. But I took it a step further by joining all-county band and prepping for a career as a musician. Upon graduation, I did my first year of college at Wesley College in Dover so I could prepare for the onslaught of auditions to "real" music programs. Needless to say, Juilliard was a bit above my skill level. But after a kick-butt audition, I was accepted to the music performance program at the No. 4 conservatory in the nation at Shenandoah University.

After two days of going to music classes, I changed my major to communications with a minor in political science. I then spent the next four-and-a-half years producing a college sports show, producing radio programs and ranting at the occasional political debate. I got into sports, learned lacrosse from my college roommate and was one of the founding members of Phi Kappa Sigma...the first social fraternity on the Shenandoah campus. We partied quite hard, got evicted from a few houses, and generated some social life into a college more concerned with music theatre than music appreciation.

But I survived those days and left Shenandoah to kick-off my career by working for small market TV stations in Salisbury, Maryland. My first gig was a web producer for WBOC-TV, which was the CBS affiliate for the Delmarva Peninsula. With my love of sports nagging at me, I left to take a Producer/Sports Photographer job with the market competition, WMDT-TV, the ABC affiliate. But after making a mere $5.50 an hour and working two part-time jobs just to make rent, I decided it was time to make more money. So I left the business to try my hand with media relations. I did some interning with the University of Delaware and got a full-time internship with the sports information department at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

Youngstown was an adventure in itself. I took the internship because YSU offered free housing and a stipend. Little did I know when accepting the job, my free housing was in a mental home in the ghetto. I'm not kidding!

The home was a compound of three old mansions build together. Each home had a top floor apartment used for live-in nurses. The owner of the complex was a big football booster and offered one of the apartments to the athletic department for an intern or assistant coach. The best part was having to walk through a locked cage at the top of the steps to get up to my door. And aside from the shootings nearby, the stabbings out front and the crackheads across the street, it wasn't so bad.

After finding Youngstown was way too damn cold and my stipend only went so far, I decided to investigate a full-time job. A few weeks later I was packing a truck to take a cool sports producer position with a start-up dot.com company in Raleigh, NC. called Total Sports.

This was where my career journey should have ended. I was finally living in a state where the climate was just warm enough that people freaked over the occasional snowfall. The city was large enough to have an NHL team and I was surrounded with big-time college sports. I was also earning stock options on a swanky company about to go public. I seriously thought this gig would make me millions and leave me swilling cocktails with Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and former dot.com guy himself. Ah, but no cigar there! I got laid off about 8 months after taking that job and watched the company implode as many ill-fated dot.coms did in those days.

I then took an online sports editor position with the News & Record in Greensboro, NC. That lasted a few years until they put the squeeze on their budget and eliminated my position. Yeah, two layoffs will do wonders for your budget!

But Greensboro was one of the best times of my life where I met some of my best friends. I originally moved in with fraternity brother Kevin Hannemann. We did some damage at the local bars until Kev decided to move closer to family in Virginia. I then moved into my first hip downtown loft. It was around that time I became friends with guys like Dan Kelly, Matt Crossley, Mike Morley, Nate Abraham, Jeff Hahne and Brad Spitz. I started hosting parties in my loft and socialized with the entire crew, including Heather Holmes, Kara Gregson, Charlie Stafford, Charlie Atkinson, and Anita Reed.

By the time I was hit with my second layoff, I had moved into a funky townhouse neighborhood similar to Melrose Place. My roommate was best friend Dan Kelly, and our neighbors included good friends Robin Wagner, Ben Sheppard, Rich and Chrisa Howard and many other young professionals. We hosted weekend parties in our parking lot. We grilled out all the time and watched movies and the Stanley Cup on the side of our building. Matt Crossley would crash on the couch from time to time or call us bright and early on Saturday mornings. "Would you like to have...some breakfast!!!"

It was around this time I started working with good friend Ryan Maltese at North Carolina A&T. I spent several months at the historic institution as their University Scheduler. But my heart was still in journalism, so when the Winston-Salem Journal called about an online sports editor position, I jumped at it.

I remained living in Greensboro for another seven months while I waited on another cool downtown loft to get built on Trade Street in Winston. Now, if you've never been to Winston-Salem, it will shock you. To this day it's the only city that made my jaw drop when I first saw it. It's nothing like a New York or Chicago, but there is a skyline with very dense and historic neighborhoods. I guess growing up in Delaware I figured I knew which cities had a bunch of tall buildings and which were cow-towns. I thought the latter for Winston and was in for a surprise.

So after realizing my downtown loft was taking forever to get built, Dan Kelly and I found another cool townhouse, this one in the West End neighborhood. Again, we had great neighbors, hosted a kickin' party and spent much of our time visiting the local watering holes. This is where I established my first writing career, launching a weekly column in the downtown magazine and writing a weekly email blast called "What's up Triad!"

It had only been about 9 months working with the Journal when my boss notified me of a position open with our flagship property, TBO.com in Tampa. Having always wanted to live in Florida, I couldn't pass up the chance to explore the job, not to mention it was a good excuse for a vacation. So in late June of 2003, Dan and I drove down to Tampa for my interview and a weekend of rowdiness in Ybor City.

To try and save some time with this story, I ended up getting the producer job with TBO.com. And after an amazing weekend of parties and meeting cool people, I had convinced buddy Dan that Tampa was the way to go. On my 29th birthday of 2003, Dan and I moved our crap down to sunny Florida. We unpacked our beds and then hit the clubs.

I only spent two years in Tampa, but I can honestly say it was probably the most exciting time of my life. Tampa was the ultimate combination of great weather, great nightlife, great fashion, tons of young people, professional sports, and endless activities. And you can bet Dan and I were all over it!

I quickly set out to engage the famous nightlife I had only experienced on random weekends. I found myself wanting to know more and finding there was no outlet for information on bars and clubs. So I created it myself. With the help of friends like Dan, Nick Kerzman, and Chris Smith, I launched Nocturnal Vibe, the first nightlife column on TBO.com and established a true media outlet for DJs, promoters and clubs.

Entertainment and nightlife became my passion while writing and photography became my medium. My weekends were filled with DJ shows, VIP rooms, private parties and promoting my column to an ever-expanding audience. It wasn't out of the ordinary for my friends and I to find ourselves heading home from a night at the club as the sun was rising to the East. I partied hard, but I established a reputation throughout Florida and saw my column rise to one of the top 5 pages on TBO.com.

But like every party, it had to end. For me it was the point where I started to grow up and focus more on my producing career. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you laughing. But it's true. The next two years of my life was spent living in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most interesting and diverse metros in our country. I worked as the sports content producer for Insidebayarea.com and used this diverse landscape to refine my photography skills. I spent many nights shooting images of Bay Area neighborhoods and iconic structures like the Golden Gate Bridge and even used these two years to refine my nightlife photography skills, shooting some of the biggest DJ events held in the U.S. Outside of photography I joined the Lake Merritt Rowing Club and started running 5Ks. But it was in California where I was introduced to dancing.

I can't remember the exact date, but it was sometime around September of 2006 when I was introduced to swing dancing. I started taking classes at Metronome Ballroom and began learning this thing called "lindy hop." I knew nothing about the dance but enjoyed learning something new. I was introduced to the social aspect of partnered dancing and recall attending a few dances at various venues around the city. I didn't really dance a whole lot while out. I pretty much sat along the side and watched. Trying to ask people to dance when you only know one or two moves is pretty terrifying. But I stuck with it.

It was around this time I got an offer to come back east and work for the AARP. I figured dancing would be a good way to meet locals and give me a little social life in a new city, so I quickly explored the local dance scene. But I still had the problem of not being very good. If you know me personally, you know I don't like to do anything half-assed. So I started taking even more lessons and even signed up for a few privates from local professionals. I also had a chance to watch some of the best dancers in the world compete at a local competition. I was learning really quick that DC was blessed with being home to 5 or 6 of the best lindy hoppers out there and so seeing how good these kids were really inspired me. I've often said, I started dancing in SF but truly fell in love with lindy hop in DC. I credit the private lessons and watching these pros because it was DCLX 2007 when I really threw myself into the social dancing side of swing. It was like opening up a can of worms. Seeing how good people could be and realizing there was nothing limiting yourself really pushed me. So from that point forward, I dedicated myself to the dance and learned as much as I could about the history of jazz and the people who helped create the lindy hop in 30's Harlem. Before I knew it, I was signing up for a competition.

I've since traveled to almost every major city in the U.S., competing and taking workshops. I started teaching for a local swing dance organization and even started to host a weekly dance at a nightclub in DC. I've since done my best to balance my photography, dancing and social life, but these things are all very much a part of my life. Dancing lindy hop makes you happy. And it's opened up a whole new world of partnered dancing that I never knew existed. It's also allowed me to explore and photograph some of our most famous cities and use my nightlife resume to visit some of America's biggest and best nightclubs. I have no idea where my worlds of dancing and photography will take me, but for now I'm just enjoying the ride.