Robservations: Answers to your questions
Even with my toes in the Gulf of Mexico, I can’t let the good readers (and potential 2006 “Best of the Best” voters) down. So here’s a pre-written dose of “Robservations” prepared before your friendly neighborhood sports columnist heads for vacation:
A while back, one of our A-section columnists penned an editorial piece in which he answered some of the frequently asked questions he’s received through his years in this business.
In like fashion, your friendly neighborhood sports columnist has elected to follow suit this Friday, with his own list of FAQ’s, and the best possible attempts at some answers. Enjoy, be informed, and if the question on your mind isn’t listed, assume it just hasn’t been asked frequently enough.
A: Well, if you call this “a living,” I guess the answer is yes. But there are a few more details to this job than just traveling around to ball fields. There are schedules to compile, statistics to find, photos to take, and pages to lay out three days a week where we decide, as Bob Seger once so eloquently said, “what to leave in; what to leave out.”
A: For a while, sure. What kind of sports fan wouldn’t love to get into everything free, and you’ve got to be a fan — to some extent — to ever get into this business.
But after a while, I’ll admit, you’ve seen all the ball you care to see. Like everything else, sooner or later even “fun jobs” become “jobs.” But you’ve got to love what you do, as my father once wisely said, or you shouldn’t keep doing it. So, even though some times a ballgame is the last thing we might want to do at that moment, we press on.
A: That’s the big one. That’s the one we get all the time. And the possible answers are many.
First, keep in mind we’re a two-man operation around here, so the biggest number of events we can get to in a given day is just that — two. Every day, we have to decide what gets covered, and what doesn’t. This becomes particularly hard during basketball season, where we have seven elementary or junior high teams and two high schools.
Secondly, and this one is especially true about summer leagues, we might not have any idea you’re playing. Nobody gets paid to make sure a non-school related league’s schedule or game results get to this office, so sometimes (even though we ask, over and over again), we hear nothing from a league. That is, of course, until Little Johnny goes 4-for-4 in his youth game, then everyone wonders why we weren’t there.
And thirdly, we go back to the two-man crew situation again. When we don’t staff a game, several of the area coaches understand why, and are very dedicated to making sure we get their results. They fax in scorebooks, call and leave messages, or even e-mail their scores.
Other coaches, I can only assume from their actions, either don’t care about getting their results in, or want to hide the fact that they lost a game. So unless there is good news, they want no news at all.
A: That’s always a good question. Usually, we panic for a few minutes, then we start scraping together whatever we can get. Stay tuned to see what we get this year.