Little League...ugh

Little League's coming up for us too. We don't join Little League coverage until the end of all-star tournaments for our district, but we'll follow them through state, regional and national if need be. One of my dreams is to someday go to the Little League World Series and cover it, but I like this time of year. It's a good three to four-week diversion before football and fall sports kick in.

 

I enjoy covering it for the most part, just hate showing up to a field when the bracket says a game should be on, only to find out that the game I came for won't be played for another three hours.

 

It's just like preps, where at every place I've worked, there's one school that never calls or sends in results, until they find out you're picking an all-county team, then they become a fountain of information.

Little League, Ripken, ect., know how to find us when they have sign-ups, need volunteer coaches and umpires, are putting on a golf tournament, ect., they can use the same number/email to send us brackets, results, etc. But call me five minutes before the title game and expect us to be there "because the kids are trying so hard," you get the same reply: Get a digital camera and take a few snapshots.

Reminds me of something that happened last week. The principal of Podunk High sent me a note about how their football team did in a passing tourney over on the coast, and did I know the school was hosting one this weekend? I didn't, but one phone call to the head coach and within an hour I had rules, brackets and a diagram for the fields. Made for some nice pictures and stories on an otherwise dull weekend. Why weren't we at the subregional intergallactic divisionals? Well, we didn't know about it until you called in and bitched about it ...

 

Have you thought about maybe getting a freaking life?

 

I was going to buy him that dog, but fuck 'im.

 

Covering games is hard. You have to pay attention and then talk to people afterwards.

 

It's more difficult when you take off midway through so you can take a required 20-minute break [/crossthread]

 

Yep, I think the one time I got bylines in the Boston Globe and New York Times (separately, before the Times bought the Globe) were as a result of the Little League regional in Bristol, Conn. Love those days you can work for separate papers, though I am not sure those two papers were the same year.

 

I must admit, I wasn't generally a fan of my son's LL games -- one 35-walk game for which I was the scorekeeper comes to mind. But when he made All-Stars a couple of times, I was proud of him -- he was a valuable utility type, not a star -- and one of my life highlights from him was a game where he made the big defensive play to end the inning, singled in his only at-bat to follow in the bottom of the inning off a kid about two feet taller than him and then scored the winning run.

Sorry, return to the more professional discussion.

 

No need to apologize for that, SF ... the question I think a lot of us have is whether any of that belongs in the newspaper. The idea of staffing anything below high school level makes me cringe.