Dave Kindred now writing about high school girls' basketball team

I thought there would be interest here in this, Big time sports writer finds fulfillment covering small town team | Poynter.

 

Pretty good story, but let's not get carried away. Sounds to me like a well-respected writer who is semi-retired and just doing this because he enjoys it. He's still doing the golf stuff and working on a book. One thing surprised me, though, that he would write this about a high school girls basketball team:

 

Damn. I used to be sports editor at a small daily and he lived in our coverage area. We joked a few times about how we should get sign him up as a stringer to cover the local high school never thinking he might have actually done it.

 

Dave should step into the cauldron of third-grade basketball.

 

I just can't imagine Dave Kindred being told by a parent that he's costing a kid a college scholarship.

 

But he's only posting these as a blog for the school and to the team's Facebook page, if I'm reading it right. Not for publicity for the kids.

 

Ed did a nice job telling about my fun with the girls basketball team. I started five seasons ago because a friend's daughter was on the team. Another friend had created a website dedicated to the team. (His daughter played.) So I volunteered, he Googled me, and said OK. ... I liked the way the team played hard every minute. (Had two D-1 prospects. Nothing's much worse than a bad girls' game.) Liked paying attention. Liked driving with my wife in the winter to the little gyms, the kind we grew up in around central Illinois. Loved the writing, which has never been work (no deadlines, no box scores) ... Games are 1:15 and over, no halftime extravaganzas, no "game experience," just a game. ... Yeah, I was hard on East Peoria but only because they earned it with thuggish play and classless behavior. ... Unreliable sources say I'll be "banned" from their gym for next year (even Rupp and Knight never tried that) ... best thing is, writing for Milk Duds keeps my typing fingers fit for when somebody wants to pay me in dollar bills (Golf Digest, Sports on Earth, Fox Sports, and I'm doing a book that's as dark as the girls basketball is light.) ... The website is Mortonladypotters.com. ... Because the webmaster was out of town for a while, I started posting the columns on my Facebook page. Now they're both places. ...

 

If Dave works really hard, hopefully he'll be allowed to cover real sports again.

 

Hopefully Dave can build up some good clips.


I think probably if I did this to any greater extent than what I'm doing on the club volleyball and kids' basketball threads, I'd probably go ahead and do boxes (UNOFFICIAL of course) and bang 'em out within a few hours of the game, just for old time's sake.

Kids' hoops season has three (maybe four) games left; maybe I'll do one as a good ole-fashioned gamer-and-sidebar.

 

I was horrified by the "can't spell class without a-s-s" comment that he wrote. Of course, if it's his own blog or the school's facebook page, I guess it doesn't really matter. I'm sure he enjoys it but it sounds like to me he's just bored and doesn't want to quit writing or retire. Retiring is the last big step before the final big step: dying. Not sure Dave is ready to accept that.

 

I'm not. I only wish I could get away with that after seeing some of the bullshit coaches pull on a weekly basis.

 

Thinking back to my days covering preps, a truer statement may never have been written.