It was almost a year ago when I first started cautiously tip-toeing around the Catch It Kansas office. If you are wondering what a year spent in this chair is like, allow me to let you in.
For all the football fans out there, you know the toll the summer months take on your sanity in anticipation of the opening kickoff. Now take that madness and add to it a summer spent entering football schedules and writing team previews.
Around the office, we compare the teams we are previewing, size up the way we think the different classes will play out, and slowly cross days off the calendar.
By the time the fall kicks off, you are absolutely foaming at the mouth to see how it all plays out.
With the start of the season, comes many editions of the zoo we like to call, “The Catch It Kansas Show.” There is no telling what is going to happen from 6 to 11:30 pm on a Friday night.
Sometimes things go very smoothly.
Other times, there is a horrifying silence that grips the sports office. You would like to just sit and enjoy the peace and quiet while it lasts, but you can’t. The certainty of the storm brewing weighs on your mind too heavily.
The chaos that happens next can be best described as a laboratory riot, led by the escaped, demented, experimental test monkeys bent on revenge.
There is no time to panic, and there is no time to flinch. Just put your head down, find the order within the whirlwind, and make it happen. It is quite the beautiful dance those of us who live for unrestrained, unscripted, and unpredictable insanity.
When the show comes over Halloween weekend, you have to do it all in the dark with a strobe light sitting beside you, flashing in your face.
Keep moving forward. You can’t let a little seizure get in the way of the show.
With the fall, part of your job description entails dealing with belligerent phone calls from people who want to talk about, well, everything except high school sports. I am always up for some good sports talk, but I have always had friends with which to have these conversations.
Most, if not all, of the journalists I know, chose this profession because it seems like the best path to put as much distance as possible between you and a math problem.
So you can imagine the process involved with figuring out the 6A and 5A playoff seeding. Last year, we accidentally discovered a formula which ripped a gaping hole in the space-time continuum and dropped the office off in a parallel dimension. We were there for what seemed like a couple of hours when in fact, we were only gone for a split second.
That was a wild night.
As the Kansas winter rolls in, we are all ready for indoor sports. Football is great, and frostbite is a part of the pain that makes it great. I love the way the intensity picks up as the postseason moves on, but heated gyms start sounding real good.
After about a 13-hour work day covering state football, there was relief when it was over. After weeks of continually ratcheted up intensity and pressure, it goes away with the time remaining on the clock. There were vows that basketball season would be much calmer.
It is a poor, gullible sap who would believe basketball is calmer. Now you have Tuesday joining forces with Friday. Add two games per site with girls and boys, and what you get is anything but calm.
Winters are packed with more basketball than you could ever imagine. But for guys like me, the best part of winter comes when the gym floors are covered with mats.
Wrestling is unlike any other high school sport. It is the only combat sport organized under KSHSAA.
While it is combative, don’t get it confused with grotesque brutality. The friendships forged out of the intense nature of the sport are incredibly strong. Two contestants charge forward with every last drop of will and determination, causing an explosion in the center of the mat. When a match is over, not only will you know what you are made of, but you will know exactly what your opponent is made of as well.
Wrestling presents its own coverage challenges. I am not an old man, but I’m not getting any younger either. So when a dual, or the finals of a tournament, ends, my knees hate me for sitting on the gym floor next to the mat for the duration.
Wrestling keeps things moving maybe better than any other sport. But this makes grabbing interviews difficult. Do you chase the winner down right after the match and sacrifice the video of the next match? Or do you get the video, and take your chances trying to find a person after it is all over? It is a fine art.
There is also a matter of time restrictions on video highlights per match. Showing a pin is great. But like every other sport, the end result is only the payoff for hard work to set things up. Seeing a referee’s hand slap the mat with a wrestlers shoulders pinned is the glamorous shot. But does the way the winner set up and executed the takedown to get the pin make better, more informative video?
The 6A and 5A state wrestling tournaments were a lot of fun and Catch It Kansas had nothing short of a command center to strategically plan and execute with a small army of reporters.
Like the fall, the winter too eventually comes to an end, giving us all a chance to rest up. It also brings more solemn vows that the spring will be easier.
I wasn’t very quick to believe. I had been burned before.
But the spring really is laid back. I never understood why bat and ball sports don’t get the same attention as football or basketball. This goes for college as well as high school.
You show up to the diamond, and it can sometimes be self-service. There may not be an announcer, scoreboard, or even a program.
If information was as scarce in the fall as it is the spring, there would be a massive uprising.
Bat and ball sports are notoriously streaky. Over the course of a 20-game season, there is not a lot of time to pull out of a slump. But if things come together at just the right moment, a single-elimination postseason can set the table for the miraculous.
Ask the Douglass Bulldogs. Entering the regional tournament, Douglass boasted a 6-11 record, and a 10-man roster, hardly a team to strike fear into the heart of an opponent.
But after taking care of Chaparral in the first round, Douglass beat 20-1 Wichita Collegiate and 17-2 Medicine Lodge to take a regional championship. At the state tournament in Manhattan the Bulldogs stayed hot, beating 19-0 Doniphan County to eventually take fourth in the state with a 10-13 record.
Don’t forget about Valley Center, a team that marched through its regional with a 4-16 record before beating 19-0 Silver Lake in the first round of state. The Hornets, like the Bulldogs, took fourth place with a below .500 record.
After the final postseason push, there is suddenly nothing. It’s back to looking toward the 2010 football season. There were countless hours and countless stories, but there was also an immeasurable amount of fun. The amount of fun had in this office and out in the field has made the past year seem like a couple of hours.
That, or...are we are back in the parallel dimension?
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