When I’m not on assignment, I sometimes find myself fielding questions about my job. A lot of the time, the question is something along the lines of, “How do you find your stories?” Other times, it’s something like, “How is such-and-such team doing, and how far can they go this year?” I don’t normally surprise people with my answers.
But, there is one question I get every now and then that does surprise some people: “Do you like all sports?”
If I said, “yes,” I’d be lying. Most sportswriters, broadcasters and other personalities you’ll meet will feel the same way. Fortunately for me, I don’t have to cover most of the sports I don’t like and will never have to if I don’t move to Europe.
I don’t plan on ever moving to Europe.
There are, however, a number of sports I don’t understand thoroughly, and that’s also not uncommon for my profession. You have to have at least a fundamental knowledge of most high school sports, and anyone wishing to cover professional or top-tier college-level sports had better have a deep understanding of what they’re talking about. In other cases, usually with niche sports, I have another job to do.
My first real story assignment for a newspaper, not counting high school sports recaps, was to cover a two-day Lakeland waterskiing tournament in the summer of 2012. I had no idea how waterskiing competitions were judged, or how they were organized, so the advice I got from my editor was simple: “You’d better start reading about it.”
In that case, I had no choice — the writer for whom I was filling in happened to be the only one who knew how the sport worked. So, I did my homework on the sport, formed a fundamental knowledge of it and wrote a couple of articles.
It’s kind of fun to learn a new sport one day and watch it in action the next, though I’ve only had to do it three-and-a-half times in my relatively short career. Other than the waterskiing tournament, all of the other instances happened here in Plant City.
I say “three-and-a-half,” because I don’t know if I’d consider Flugtag to be a sport. I’d place it with things like NASCAR and figure skating on the “competition” side of the fence dividing competitions and sports, but some of you may not feel the same way. We’ll agree to disagree, in that case.
The other two events, though, were definitely sports. You’ll recall that, in our last two issues, I wrote a story and snapped photos for the Charity Polo Classic. That was the first time I had ever done anything with polo that wasn’t buying shirts at Ralph Lauren. Doing the preview story before attending the match was crucial to my understanding of the sport because, as simple to understand as it actually is, I would have been totally lost had I just gone in there flying blind. It’s definitely a niche sport, because of the amount of money involved, but it’s very cool. I’d absolutely watch it on television at a sports bar and get into it.
More recently, you’ll notice this week’s lacrosse coverage — also my first time following the sport. I’ve attended a game before, right before I graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University, but didn’t really pay attention. I had just played basketball for two hours and do not remember why my buddy Smalls wanted to catch the game so badly, so I was unfocused and glued to my phone. We ended up leaving maybe 20 minutes after we got there, because eating Moe’s sounded like a better idea at the time.
Despite last Wednesday’s nasty weather, it turned out to be a fun shoot. Many years spent around the game of hockey came in handy, because I quickly noticed that lacrosse is much like hockey on feet. It also helped that the Cougars were riding so high, because their energy made for a lot of good photos. The Jefferson boys, on the other hand, weren’t really feeling it that night.
“Whatever,” their goalie chirped. “Hey, y’all won’t beat us in football, though!”
I later learned that almost all of the Dragons are football players. So, if you want to get technical about it, Jefferson football got whooped by Durant that night.
There are still a few things I’m teaching myself to pick up on but, unlike scoring waterskiing, I’ll enjoy retaining everything I learn for longer than three weeks.