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It’s in the books. I covered my first game/event yesterday for the Statesman. Check out the finished product in the post below. It was fun overall, but I realized I still have a lot to learn. It’s not like I was expecting to be an expert on the first try, though.

The meet was at Bush Park and it was a great day weather-wise for a race. I’ll be honest, for as worried as I was about this whole ordeal… it was pretty much a perfect situation for my first time reporting. It was a low-key dual meet on a beautiful day. I didn’t know everybody involved (coaches and athletes), but that comes with the territory. Both coaches were accessible, and the beauty of chatting with high school kids is that they won’t turn down talking to a newspaper reporter. College kids or older? They might say no, but not high schoolers.

I got there and surveyed the situation, trying to figure out where the athletes would start and finish. Thankfully, both occurred in the same area. I talked with one of the coaches about some logistical things. Soon, the race began.

Cross country is interesting and unique in that the course often stretches all over. You’re lucky if you see the athletes pass more than once or twice. I didn’t know the course, but I followed where some parents were going and caught athletes as they passed through, so I got a sense of how the race was going. Luckily, in my case, all I really needed was results for the article. And, if there was a story in how the race went, I could get that info from athletes quotes because I asked them about how the race went.

It was a fairly short race — within fifteen minutes, the first athletes were coming to the finish. Being the rookie I am, I wasn’t sure of the best time to get quotes from athletes. I mean, they’re breathing hard and bending over trying to catch their breath right after they finish. Not exactly a time when they’d want to talk, plus it’s hard to hear someone clearly when they’re gasping for breath. One athlete was milling around with his parents, so I moved closer and looked for my opportunity to talk to him. That instance was easy… just introduced myself and conducted the interview. The other athlete I needed to interview had taken off with a couple teammates for a cool down jog. I had to wait to talk to her, but I was able to track her down eventually.

I suppose I will learn more and more about how to track down athletes and coaches to get quotes. I thought I did a pretty good job. It just so happened that the two athletes I needed to talk to finished very close together and one of them ran off. Thankfully, I was able to track her down later. It all worked out. And, my personality is more on the shy side, so I’m sure I will develop a more outgoing personality so it becomes easier to approach athletes and coaches. And if you don’t know something, you’ve gotta ask. Ask around until you find out what you need to find out. It’ll come.

I was more worried about the logistics of finding the athletes and coaches I needed to get quotes from. The meet itself was the pressure cooker as far as I was concerned. The writing part didn’t concern me nearly as much, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be.

I’ll be honest, as soon as I found out Sunday that I was covering this meet (dubbed the Civil War), my first two or three paragraphs were already written. And when I heard about the ice cream idea, where the losing team serves ice cream to the winning team, the Jacquizz Rodgers-LaMichael James bit came to mind. Those two parts of the article came easy. The rest was more challenging.

The difficult part was having all of this information in my head, plus some more info I had scribbled in my note pad, plus trying to organize all the quotes from what athletes and coaches said in their interviews… and then trying to combine it all and write a coherent article. I also had to explain the unique format of the meet in a way that made sense. It took more time than I thought it would. All told, I think it took an hour and 15 minutes to write it. I’m sure as I gain more experience, I’ll learn to be able to produce them a lot quicker. I’m just thankful it was an afternoon meet and not a night game that was super close to deadline.

I’ll chalk this up as a fun learning experience. I talked with my boss after he edited my story. The good thing? My article stayed mostly intact. The only changes he made were small and minor, so I was happy about that. He said it was a solid first effort. I’ll take it. Plus, he said there may be other opportunities down the road to do some more writing, so we’ll see if that happens.

I had fun, it was better than I thought, and I worried too much going into it. Yep, most people kept saying that everything in the previous sentence would be true. And they were right. Congrats. And, the article was on the cover of the sports section today, above the fold. Pretty cool. I’m sure if I keep doing this, the coolness of getting a byline will wear off, but right now it feels pretty good.

Now back to my “lowly” sports assistant job of taking phone calls, starting with my shift tonight.

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