TERRY MOSHER
REBECCA DARROW, NORTH KITSAP, CLAIMS SECOND IN HIGH JUMP AT STATE 2A TRACK AND FIELD MEET.
Photo by Kitsap Sun
This year’s conclusion to the spring sports season for local high schools might have been one of the best in memory. I’m leaking a truth here so forgive me, but we in the sports department at the Bremerton Sun (now Kitsap Sun) used to hope that our local teams would not be too successful because this particular time of the year – Memorial Day weekend when the state’s high school sports wind up not only the spring athletic season, but is closing down on the end of the school year – pus a stressful and heavy workload on the sports department and we prayed to lessen the work we would have.
It was tough on us at the Sun even when we had five and six people in the department as we did in the early 1980s. When you have tennis teams, golf teams, soccer teams, baseball teams, softball teams and track and field teams all colliding in post-season competition you have, as far as we were concerned, a disaster in the making for us.
To qualify this a little, I never have considered writing sports work (except for the lonely nights I was the only one in the sports department taking phone calls, writing stories, and laying out the sports papers for the next day’s paper; that I did not like and felt like it was a waste of any talent I had to become in essence a glorified clerk) so take my complaining with a grain of salt. A lot of people would do just about anything to be able to get into sporting events for free to watch them, and I have yet to pay to enter a high school sports event and I’ve been doing this for 45-plus years.
So there is the good side to what I and others do as a sportswriter (I covered the Seattle Mariners for nearly 30 years, including being Major League Baseball’s official scorer at Mariner home games, and I covered Washington Husky basketball (men and women) and football games for almost the same number of years) and that puts me and others in exclusive company as far as the reward of the job, if you can call it a job.
But in a certain way we dreaded the Memorial Day weekend, especially if too many of our local teams went too far into the postseason. It was especially difficult on us as we slid into the middle 1980s when newspapers began to cut back on its employees and we were down to four of us and then three (The Kitsap Sun currently has three in the sports department).
I can tell you in some years when our teams did well, we worked nearly around the clock making it all work. And we did not have freelance writers like papers do now to help with the coverage when it gets a bit much, as I’m certain it did this year for them at the Sun. I can’t begin to imagine ‑ Ok, I can imagine because I went through it many times – how difficult it was for them to get it all covered this year because of the success the local teams had on many fronts.
When it became clear recently that the sun staff was going to be overloaded, I remember telling sports editor Nathan Joyce, “Good luck, Charlie Brown.”
But Joyce and his staff pulled it off. They had some help from freelancers, but they nailed it and when you consider that some of our local teams like Central Kitsap (softball and baseball), South Kitsap (track and field and baseball), Bainbridge (golf and baseball), and Klahowya (soccer and baseball ) in particular were competing for state championships the pressure and the hours demanded for proper coverage had to be huge.
To the Sun’s staff credit they Got-R-Done, as the Cable Guy might say, and they Got-R-Done in style. Knowing how difficult it must have been, I commend them for doing a great job.
Credit most of all, though, goes to those local athletes who for one spring year put on a display I have seldom seen in all my years of covering local sports. South Kitsap’s baseball run is really impressive. In the three years of coach Marcus Logue, the SK Wolves have finished second, second and first in 4A state baseball and that accomplishment would be enthusiastically applauded by the man who took the Wolves to the top for nearly 30 years, Elton Goodwin.
As only Elton could, and would say, to those SK athletes, “I love you, man.”
I’m belaboring the point, but it’s sufficient to say that this was a spring to long remember. Our high school sports teams often get overlooked on the state scene, especially by the largest daily paper in the state, the Seattle Times, but it’s difficult this year to overlook what the kids on the Olympic Peninsula did this spring.
So congratulations to all, and have a great summer.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.