OUR STORY

An unlikely meeting at a dive bar in Prescott, Arizona changed the trajectory of two lives forever.

June 2020: Covid year. Wimblican. The Final Score.

Shannon and James at The 2021 Wimblican Tournament

One June evening in 2020, Shannon was wrapping up a photo shoot with a recent graduate when she was approached by a news crew at the Courthouse Square in Prescott. All-the-while, somewhere across town, James was being brought back-to-life with an IV from an awesome nurse named April Odorfer.

As Shannon was leaving the Prescott Courthouse Square, a news crew approached and asked if they could interview her for a segment. She had seen them interviewing other people throughout the evening and curiosity got the best of her, so she obliged... but unbeknownst to her, this wasn't your average news crew, this was Cassady Campbell- a YouTuber who had amassed over a million subscribers by pranking the general public. As the "news crew" interviewed Shannon, the questions turned from gentle to politically polarizing. Being an election year and with Covid restrictions still looming, Shannon did her best to dodge and weave the questions and get the hell out of there. Once she did, she called her buddy Jake Zucker, who happened to be at one of Prescott's finest establishments: The Final Score Bar & Grill.

"Come over to Scores and have a drink!" Jake said, "Sounds like you need one."

So she did.

When Shannon arrived at The Final Score, she fully expected Jake to be surrounded by random women but, shockingly, when Shannon arrived, Jake was sitting at a table with three other men:

Ricky Odorfer, Brandon Nuñez, and James Roberts.

James was in rare form that night, as anyone who has ever participated in The Wimblican understands.

The Wimblican is a tennis tournament that James hosts every year but it is not your ordinary tennis tournament. The Wimblican has a very specific set of rules, one being that you cannot play tennis at all any other time of the year and the second being that you must drink a full alcoholic beverage before each match. Thankfully, nurse April was able to bring these men back to life after a long day on the courts. Somehow, they ended up at The Final Score with a bucket of shared ice cream in the middle of their table.

James and Shannon got to chatting and by the end of the night, they were fast friends.

Fast forward to September 2020.

Neither James nor Shannon had seen each other or spoken since June and, as chance would have it, they both found themselves at Finn Nuñez's first birthday party. This is where James decided that he would shoot his shot; he thought Shannon was cute so he asked for her phone number. Shannon was quick to give it. She thought that she could almost definitely set James up with one of her friends... and when he texted her asking to meet for dinner when she was working in Sedona a couple weeks later, she was so sure that James just wanted to be friends that she invited Jake (who was also working with her in Sedona that day) to grab dinner with her and James, not realizing that it was supposed to be a date.

And that's how Jake Zucker ended up third wheeling on James and Shannon's first date to Szechuan in Sedona. James even paid for all three of them and said, "my mom raised me to be a gentleman, I insist".

Shannon and James on a hike in Sedona, December 2020

Thankfully, that awkward first date didn't deter James and while Shannon was pretty terrible at reading signals, she finally understood that she wasn't going to set James up with one of her friends, she was going to date him... so she did. She showed him her love for astronomy and he showed her his love for hunting.

Soon enough, James was taking Shannon to meet his family. This time, it was Logan Onnen's first birthday party in January 2021. Exactly one year later, James flew to Maryland and met Shannon's family and close childhood friends.

James's first visit to Washington, D.C. and Annapolis, Maryland, January 2022

Since then, the pair have traveled to eleven different states, a foreign country, James taught Shannon how to fly fish, they've traversed almost a dozen National Parks together, and put a ton of miles on dirt roads. Countless camp meals, sweet snacks, and even ate a fish that was caught on their backpacking trip and cooked over an open flame in the middle of nowhere Utah.

Petrified Forest National Park, Grand Tetons National Park, and White Sands National Park

In February 2024, they welcomed their son, Paul Aloysius, into their family. Big sister Molly and big brother Jack couldn't have been more thrilled. Then, on June 18, 2024 while watching a SpaceX rocket launch from Mt. Humphreys in Flagstaff, James popped the question. Shannon said, "yes" and that leads us to current-day: getting married in Whitefish, Montana.

Thanks for being part of our story, we can't wait to start the next chapter with you alongside us!