Welcome to Part 3 of my 30-year retrospective of my days shoeleathering around Portage County covering high school track & field. I could write a book on these experiences, which cover a period of roughly a decade from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, but, short of a publishing deal, a few Round Two columns will have to do.
So, in that spirit of conciseness, I give you … Part 3.
IRON MAN
As I detailed earlier, I knew nothing about how to properly cover a high school track & field meet. I didn’t run track at Mogadore (my absence was their gain), I had never attended a track meet, and the extent of my knowledge of the sport came from watching the Olympics on TV every four years – which festooned me, the viewer, with expert commentary, instant replay video and loads of information graphics on the screen.
I learned about five seconds into covering my first high school track meet at Crestwood in April 1994 that if I wanted expert commentary and loads of information, I was going to have to go find it myself. That led to my second lesson, which came about 10 seconds after the first: To find that commentary and information, I was going to have to be at roughly the same level of physical conditioning as those Olympic athletes I had grown up watching on TV.
Which I wasn’t. Not then, not ever.
And that delivered my third lesson: Just about everybody I had to chase down for information – including coaches (Rootstown’s Larry Bailey, Field’s Bill Huntington and Kent Roosevelt’s Brian Botzman, in particular, stand out) were in better shape – way better shape – than I was. Nobody told me I was going to have to virtually be a track athlete to cover track athletes, but that was the situation I found myself in. Even some of the sportswriters I often crossed paths with back in those days, like Chris Broussard of the Akron Beacon Journal and E.L. Rogers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, looked like they could step on the track at a moment’s notice and dominate. (You know Chris now as a sports analyst and commentator for Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports Radio, while E.L. has gone on to author several books).
So I had to up my game, which included quality time on the treadmill and stationary bike that my wife and I had. And by quality time, I mean occasionally, because after a while I realized that covering these meets were workouts in themselves. At many of them, particularly the dreaded all-day invitationals, I swear I logged more miles than any of the athletes that were there. By the time I got done chasing them down for hours on end, chasing their coaches down, and running stadium steps all day to get event results, a treadmill and stationary bike wouldn’t have done much.
EVENT RESULTS
Looking back three decades later, I sometimes ask myself which would have been easier to get: results from a high school track & field invitational, or Kremlin secrets? Then reality smacks me in the face, and I think what a silly question that is. Of course, it would have been easier to get Kremlin secrets.
Today, you can go online and pretty much get any result you need from any invitational anywhere in just about real time. That would have been beautiful in the mid- to late-1990s. But at that time, if you wanted results from a high school track & field invitational, you were going to need a little patience and a lot of luck – and maybe even a crackerjack lawyer – because the keepers of the keys held their keys tightly.
As a reporter, it was made crystal clear at most invitationals that track results were for three types of people: 1. Coaches; 2. Athletes; 3. Everybody else on the planet except the media. And I suspected that species from off-planet would have been privy to results before I was.
Some places were worse than others. At one school, I had the audacity to reach my hand into a wall slot in the pressbox to grab one sheet of paper containing results for one event – and there must have been a stack of at least 30 sheets of paper in this slot – and a voice descended upon me from behind: “PUT THAT PAPER BACK!! THAT’S FOR THE COACHES!!!” I knew right then how the Scarecrow felt when he first met the Wizard.
Turning to see who the voice belonged to, I looked and saw an older gentleman seated in the middle of the pressbox, which was empty except for him, me and the woman next to him. He was eyeing me like I had just committed a rash of felonies.
“But the coach said I could get results up here,” I protested.
“THE COACH ISN’T IN CHARGE!!” came the response, which probably would have come as news to the coach.
Then, apparently anticipating my next question, came these words of wisdom: “RESULTS WILL BE MAILED TO THE PAPERS ON MONDAY.” Of course, the good people of Portage County were fully expecting to read these results in the next morning’s Record-Courier, not a week later.
But that pressbox brownshirt was Mister Rogers compared to a few other places, where the pressbox was totally off limits for anyone from … the press. These places tried to get around it by taping the result sheets onto the pressbox glass. Problem was, they would often tape these sheets of paper to the outside of the glass, which meant that if a strong wind kicked up or rain started pouring down, all the results from the meet were blown away or drenched. And if that didn’t happen, many times an athlete would search for their event results on the glass, find it, rip that sheet off the glass, and off they’d go with information you needed for your story. They probably figured there had to be more than one sheet of information available, but they figured wrong.
And if you, as media, had the gall to walk into an off-limits-to-the-press pressbox to get missing results – regardless of who was in it or how packed it was – well, that’s where that crackerjack lawyer might have come in handy.
EVENT RESULTS II
Getting results from cross country invitationals could be equally adventurous. But since there were only two events to keep track of rather than 30-plus, you could pretty much do it yourself by standing at the finish line and counting the runners as they came across.
Of course, this could get dicey in races where runners crossed the finish line in a pack, and even dicier when one or more of those runners is crawling or stumbling in that pack – as one of our R-C writers discovered at a regional cross country meet in the mid-90s.
Thankfully, this didn’t happen to me. But it could have happened to any of us anywhere. It was a cautionary tale of the importance of getting the official results no matter how many unpleasant hoops you had to jump through.
On the day in question, our intrepid reporter was covering the Division I regional meet in the Warren-Youngstown area. It was a rainy, sloppy, late-October day, and our reporter didn’t feel much like sticking around an extra hour or more in that mess waiting for meet results. So he hatched a plan: He would park himself near the finish line and count the runners as they came across, eliminating the need to wait on official results.
So the runners start crossing, and our reporter starts counting. The top 15 finishers earn a spot in the following weekend’s state championship meet in Columbus. Everything these athletes have worked so hard for is on the line.
The spots start filling up fast, and he’s quickly jotting down which of our Portage County runners finished in which place in the top 15. Fourteen runners are in, one spot left. At this moment, two runners are about dead even as they approach the finish line. One of them won’t be going to state.
Our reporter sees that one of the two is a Portage County runner, who seems to be pulling ahead in the last 10 meters before he loses his balance, stumbles and falls. He hits the ground, but he never stops moving forward, crawling to the finish line to grab the coveted 15th spot.
So that’s it. Our reporter has his area state qualifiers. Now all he needs are the interviews and he’s done. When he gets to the runner who crawled across the finish line, our reporter is beaming. “Congratulations!” he says to the kid, extending his hand. “Great job! You crawled to that 15th spot and now you’re going to state!”
“No, man!” the kid responded. “I finished 16th. I didn’t make it.” And he slumped away in abject disappointment.
Our reporter had counted wrong.
Just another day in the life.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.