Friday night writes

By Julie Cooper

Published Saturday, November 17, 2007

Being a newspaper reporter means living everyday life for a living.

We do everything you do — weekend craft fairs, balloon race, football games — we just do it all at the same time.

So when Friday night rolls around and area football fans head out to their game of choice, we do the same. We just go to five or six of them.
Our sports staff of two and our photography staff of two can cover a lot of ground. I think our team's record this year is making an in person appearance at six games in one night. (Keep in mind that our coverage area spans from Ferriday to Woodville.) Our sports editor works to play everything as fair as possible. We decide which games we'll attend based on a few things: 1. Have we covered them yet this year? 2. Who are they playing? 3. How is the season going? Is this a state championship run? Those having a good season will likely get a bit more coverage than the others, though everyone gets included.

While the crew is out, two or three of us stay at the office to man the phones and build the pages. We'll take scores from another 8-10 teams over the phone.

Football season is tough. Fridays keep us hopping. We bump our regular 11:45 p.m. sports page deadline back to 12:45 a.m. We haul in food, and we settle in for the long night.
And as the season comes to a close (there were only five local teams playing tonight ... down from 10) we can start to breathe a little.

Though we always pull for our local teams to play well, we do have a tendency toward the end of the season to let out a sigh of relief when someone's season ends.

This year, our area will have at least one team in the state championship. Trinity and Centreville will face off this week for the South State title. The winner will play for the overall title. Franklin County and Huntington also still have a shot.

And our sports section will be there along with them. We'll be glad to see a win ... but we'll also be glad to close the door on another successful football season.
On to basketball.