COLUMN: In honor of Football Friday, stories from the press box

High school football is back! You can read all about Bibb County teams in this week’s Melody football preview section. We’ve got schedules, interviews with coaches, rosters and photos for each one of Macon’s Macon teams (as well as Mercer and Fort Valley State). 

For those who are not particularly interested in sports, don’t worry: this is a story about people, not about win-loss records. 

Covering high school sports is a rite of passage. It’s often the gateway into journalism for young writers. Every newspaper I’ve ever worked for featured at least one local sports “stringer,” a freelance writer who for some reason liked to spend about 12 Thursday or Friday evenings a year in a cramped press box covering high school football (that’s if the stadium had a press box). Editors came and went, but the local stringers were eternal. 

Some of my earliest assignments were covering local teams. The sports editor picked the hometown team: not a juicy assignment, considering they were in the midst of an 0-40 slump when I started at the Greenville Herald Banner. I drove the 15 minutes to Commerce, Texas, to cover the Tigers. Kick off was about 6 p.m., games were over by 9, I was back in the office by 9:30, my story was done by 10 and then I started designing the sports section. 

We had about a dozen stringers who would send in their stories between 10 and midnight. Some emailed, but a few called them in, dictating their stories over the phone to me or a part-timer we had to help us on Friday nights. My sports editor would show up around 1o with his story, file it and his photos and then start editing copy. 

It was a ton of work and I didn’t leave until the newspaper was off the press and to the mailroom (about 2 a.m.), where ads were inserted into the newspaper, papers were bundled and given to carriers. 

Social media was in its infancy — Facebook had just been opened up to non-college students — and I just didn’t hear a lot of feedback about my Tigers coverage. I wondered if that extra work covering Commerce High School home games was really worth it. 

*****

Saturdays, I would go cover the local Division II football team: Texas A&M University-Commerce. An A&M-Commerce graduate, I had been around the football program for years and knew many of the coaches and players. At halftime, I’d abandon my fellow press box dwellers, sweet talk my way into the president’s box and come away with a plate of real food. 

A culture develops in a press box. There’s the sports information director who, along with help from student workers, keeps the game stats and prints them off for the reporters at the end of each quarter. Reporters are there to work, so there’s no cheering in the press box. During lulls in the action during weather delays the veterans entertain the younger reporters with stories of spectacular players and games from years gone by.

When needed, I’ve helped as a spotter, looking through binoculars for jersey numbers as players peeled themselves out of dogpiles, trying to figure out who to award the tackle to. We did our best, but sometimes you just had to give a tackle to someone (one year when I was spotting, A&M-Commerce linebacker Danny Mason led Division II  in tackles per game. Take from that what you will).

One of my favorite journalism stories happened back when I was still a student. I broke the news that A&M-Commerce football coach Guy Morriss, a former NFL lineman who had previously coached at Baylor and Kentucky, was stepping down. 

A week later, one of the communications folks at the university asked me how I found out about the carefully guarded secret of Morriss’ departure. I was simply walking by his office one day and he was packing up boxes. 

“Heading out for the semester?” I asked in passing. 

“Nope,” he replied. “I’m leaving for good.”

*****

Toiling away on sidelines and crowded, un-air conditioned press boxes can wear on you. But it’s important. We’re recording history, telling stories of remarkable achievement and effort from the hundreds of local athletes and coaches. Those stories will endure for a long time, whether tucked away in scrapbooks or floating in the “cloud.” 

Those Commerce High School football games I wrote about, the ones I thought no one (or very few) people cared about? The following spring I was in the high school to cover an athlete signing with a college team. The signing was in the cafeteria, which often doubled as an auditorium. As I got near the double doors that led into the cafeteria, I stopped.

Someone had cut out all of my football stories, glued them to a poster board, framed it and hung it on the wall. Every day as students and teachers walked to and from lunch, they walked by my stories. 

You’ll never know the true impact of your work. You just have to believe in what you’re doing and do it for the right reasons. The rest will come.

Caleb Slinkard is the managing editor of The Macon Melody. Email him at
[email protected].