It's been a long time coming

Hokay. So here is a long feature story that I wrote nearly seven month ago, but finally worked up the courage to post.
I guess it was the fear of having what I consider to be my best work ripped apart that kept me from laying out there. But have at it.
At the time it was published, I was told that there were very few words that the story didn't need. However, now I am interested to see if it could have been made shorter/better.
Thank for the impending input.

Running through the Pain​

The hardest part for Trip Emerson was knowing that this was the race that Vernon never got to run.
Emerson, the coach of the Chatham cross country team, watched as his runners toed the starting line at Ballou Park for the Oct. 1 Metro meet and couldn’t help but think of Vernon Randolph Jr.
How much Randolph, a first-year cross country runner, had wanted to take to the Ballou Park course back on Aug. 21, in the preseason Metro meet. How the Chatham junior had been grinning from ear-to-ear, wanting to get out and run. And how that race was canceled due to rain.
What made it hard for Emerson, and for the entire Chatham team for that matter, was that Randolph never got that chance to run in his first race. He died the next day in a single-car crash.
So when the Cavaliers took to the Ballou Park course for the regular season Metro meet, they were without one of their own. They wore black and yellow ribbons over their hearts in Randolph’s honor — black in remembrance, yellow because it was one of his favorite colors. And when they ran, they ran for him, just as they have in every race this season. It’s how the Cavaliers cope. It’s how they have decided to heal — together.
“The kids understand. They know who they’re running for,” Emerson said. “They miss him, I miss him. I miss seeing him out there running.
“But we have to keep running, because that’s what he would want us to do.”

GETTING THE CALL​

Kimani Blackmon thought it was a joke when she heard the news.
Blackmon lived on the same street as Randolph, and she had known him for years. The two even dated off and on for a bit before Randolph joined Blackmon on the cross country team.
She was also a couple of Sudafed pills away from catching a ride with Randolph that evening.
“He had called and asked if I wanted to ride with him,” Blackmon said. “But I said no, because I was feeling kind of sick.”
Randolph was going to go to Skatetown to spend some time with a couple of cousins who were visiting from Connecticut, and he was skipping out on singing for a youth revival session to do it. That in of itself was an oddity for the kid who loved to sing, for the kid who was so adamant in his faith.
Both were habits he started at an early age. Singing came when his mother got him a little cassette player and a microphone for Christmas when he was three or four. And his devotion to the church came right along with it through choir practice, Sunday school and then Bible study.
“That’s one thing I can say, is that Vernon was saved,” Randolph’s mother, Monica, said. “I’d be sitting in the back of the church, and there’d be Vernon, coming up the aisle praising the spirit.”
But Vernon had really wanted to spend some time with his cousins, and because he rarely ever missed anything church-related, Monica let him go.
“I told him, ‘Vernon, I’m going to let you do it this time … I’m going to go and I’m going to sing in your place,’” his mother said.
Monica said that Vernon was on his way home from his grandmother’s house to eat dinner before going to Skatetown when it happened. Randolph’s sister, Victoria, a freshman at Chatham, and his two cousins were in the car with him when it ran off the side of Route 719.
Randolph overcorrected, and his 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee flipped in the middle of the road. Vernon, who was not wearing his seatbelt, was ejected from the car. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The perpetually happy 16- year-old — who wore his grin so broad and so much that Monica likened him to the Wal-Mart smiley face — was gone.
Blackmon couldn’t believe it when she heard of his death.
“Then I called one of my friends and she was crying,” Blackmon said. “That’s when I knew it was true.”
The news traveled fast.
Emerson found out through a phone call from a former student, and then he set about the task of letting the rest of the team know after he confirmed the tragic facts.
“It’s just one of those things where you have to do it, I guess,” Emerson said. “You don’t want to do it, you hate to do it, but it has to get done.
“We felt it would be better to let the parents know. But then the kids started calling each other.”
That’s how Tyler Younger, a junior who had known Randolph since his freshman year, found out — from one of those phone calls between teammates.
“I was at home watching TV and Danielle (Beauvais) called,” Younger said. “It didn’t sink in.
I couldn’t make myself believe it. I had just seen him the day before and talked to him.
“It took two or three days to sink in — by the funeral.”

THE HEALING PROCESS​

The Cavaliers returned to practice two days after Randolph’s death.
It was a hard day. A quiet day.
“It was like losing a brother, because we’re all like a family,” Younger said. “It was a pretty big hit.
“Everyone was kind of quiet (at practice). I didn’t know what to say. It felt like we were missing a part of us.”
Knowing what his kids were going through, Emerson simply told his team to go out for a run. He told them to run for distance, and at their own pace. He told them to collect their thoughts.
And that is how the healing process began.
The Cavaliers started to wear the ribbons on their jerseys so they could take a little piece of their lost teammate to the line with them. And they dealt with the pain every time a team wanted to do something to honor Randolph in the preseason. At one preseason meet there was a moment of silence, and at another the host team brought in a chaplain to say a few words. Each time though, the good intentions of those teams were like ripping a Band-Aid off the Cavaliers’ emotional wound.
It took until the first regular season meet for the Chatham runners to take their biggest step toward a sense of normalcy, when other teams stopped honoring Randolph and left that up to the Cavaliers themselves.
“It wasn’t until we could just get up and run that we could move forward,” Emerson said.
“Not that we forgot (Randolph). But we didn’t have to relive it then.”

RUNNING THROUGH THE PAIN​

Once the Cavaliers could finally just get up and run, they haven’t stopped. And Randolph has been helping them the whole way — particularly through the memorial ribbon.
“I think of all the good stuff, and what (Randolph) would be saying,” Blackmon said of her thoughts when she runs now. “It makes me go faster and not quit.”
Blackmon is not the only one, either.
“In the race when you want to quit, you feel it like somebody taps you on the shoulder and gives you a boost,” Younger said.
Said Beauvais: “Every race, especially toward the end, I kiss (the ribbon) and ask him and God to give me my second wind and keep going. It is more of a confirmation that he is still with me. That he’s still there watching us and running with us.”
Even those who didn’t really get the chance know Randolph still feel his influence. Zach Malpass, a Cavaliers sophomore, was just getting familiar with Vernon when he died.
“(The ribbon) just tells me that we always have an eighth man running with us,” he said.
“It makes me want to fight harder and run through the pain — for him.”

HONORING THE LOST​

Running for Randolph has not only brought the Cavaliers closer together and made them more of a team, but it has also given them a common goal. They want to win for him, too.
And not just smaller races like the Metro meet, which the Chatham boys won and the Cavalier girls finished second (by one point), but the big ones, too.
“We can go to state,” Younger said.
That’s a lofty goal for sure, but with all the Cavaliers have to run for, who can doubt them?
Not Emerson, though he also has more immediate plans in mind. He wants his team to win today’s Dogwood District meet at Frasier Farms in Altavista at 3 p.m.
He knows that beating perennial powers Altavista and Nelson County won’t be easy, but if the Cavs can, then he would like to do something special. Emerson wants to give Monica the championship trophy that he says her son deserves.
In a season during which Vernon Randolph Jr. has meant so much to the Cavaliers, handing over the trophy is what Emerson really wants for the kid with the ear-to-ear smile and the will to run.
“That’s just something that I would like to be able to give to her,” Emerson said.
It would mean a lot to Monica, too.
When asked how she felt about Emerson’s plan, the single parent’s emotions finally gave way: “Speechless. Priceless, because they thought more about him to honor him, even though he’s not there.”
But that’s where Monica is wrong. Ask any of the Cavaliers and they will say that Vernon is still with them — in their hearts.
Just like he always will be.

 

Fuchs-

Thanks for posting. My edits are in all caps, with notes at the end.


Running through the Pain
The hardest part for Trip Emerson was knowing that this was the race that Vernon never got to run. (GOOD.)
Emerson, the coach of the Chatham cross country team, watched as his runners toed the starting line at Ballou Park for the Oct. 1 Metro meet and couldn’t help but think of Vernon Randolph Jr.
How much Randolph, a first-year cross country runner, had wanted to take to the Ballou Park course back on Aug. 21, in the preseason Metro meet. How the Chatham junior had been grinning from ear-to-ear, wanting to get out and run. (DITCH “GRINNING FROM EAR-TO-EAR” - CLICHÉ. ALSO, WAS HE LITERALLY GRINNING? OR WAS HE JUST EXCITED? FIND SOME WAY TO BE SPECIFIC – EXACTLY WHAT EMOTION WAS HE FEELING – NERVOUS, ANXIOUS, EAGER – AND THEN SHOW IT, WITH HIS OWN WORDS OR MANNNERISMS, AS SPECIFICALLY AS POSSIBLE. “EAR-TO-EAR” DOESN’T DO IT.) And how that race was canceled due to rain.
What made it hard for Emerson, and for the entire Chatham team for that matter, was that Randolph never got that chance to run in his first race. (DITCH THOSE FIRST 17 WORDS – SENTENCE SHOULD BE, “RANDOLPH NEVER GOT…”) He died the next day in a single-car crash.
So when the Cavaliers took to the Ballou Park course for the regular season Metro meet, they were without one of their own. They wore black and yellow ribbons over their hearts in Randolph’s honor — black in remembrance, yellow because it was one of his favorite colors. (WHOSE IDEA?) And when they ran, they ran for him, just as they have in every race this season. It’s how the Cavaliers cope. It’s how they have decided to heal — together.
“The kids understand. They know who they’re running for,” Emerson said. “They miss him, I miss him. I miss seeing him out there running.
“But we have to keep running, because that’s what he would want us to do.”
GETTING THE CALL
Kimani Blackmon thought it was a joke when she heard the news.
Blackmon lived on the same street as Randolph, and she had known him for years. The two even dated off and on for a bit before Randolph joined Blackmon on the cross country team.
She was also a couple of Sudafed pills away from catching a ride with Randolph that evening.
“He had called and asked if I wanted to ride with him,” Blackmon said. “But I said no, because I was feeling kind of sick.”
Randolph was going to go to (DITCH “GO TO”) Skatetown to spend some time with a couple of cousins who were visiting from Connecticut, and he was skipping out on singing for a youth revival session to do it. That in of itself (THE PHRASE IS “IN AND OF ITSELF,” BUT ITS OF NO USE TO YOU NOW – JUST WRITE “THAT ITSELF”) was an oddity (“WAS ODD”) for the kid who loved to sing, for the kid who was so adamant in his faith.
Both were habits he started at an early age. Singing came when his mother got him a little cassette player and a microphone for Christmas when he was three or four. (GOOD) And his devotion to the church came right along with it through choir practice, Sunday school and then Bible study.
“That’s one thing I can say, is that Vernon was saved,” Randolph’s mother, Monica, said. “I’d be sitting in the back of the church, and there’d be Vernon, coming up the aisle praising the spirit.”
But Vernon had really wanted to spend some time with his cousins, and because he rarely ever missed anything church-related, Monica let him go.
“I told him, ‘Vernon, I’m going to let you do it this time … I’m going to go and I’m going to sing in your place,’” his mother said.
Monica said that Vernon was on his way home from his grandmother’s house to eat dinner before going to Skatetown when it happened. Randolph’s sister, Victoria, a freshman at Chatham, and his two cousins were in the car with him when it ran off the side of Route 719.
Randolph overcorrected, and his 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee flipped in the middle of the road. Vernon, who was not wearing his seatbelt, was ejected from the car. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The perpetually happy 16- year-old — who wore his grin so broad and so much that Monica likened him to the Wal-Mart smiley face (GREAT) — was gone.
Blackmon couldn’t believe it when she heard of his death.
“Then I called one of my friends and she was crying,” Blackmon said. “That’s when I knew it was true.”
The news traveled fast.
Emerson found out through a phone call from a former student, and then he set about the task of letting the rest of the team know after he confirmed the tragic facts.
“It’s just one of those things where you have to do it, I guess,” Emerson said. “You don’t want to do it, you hate to do it, but it has to get done.
“We felt it would be better to let the parents know. But then the kids started calling each other.”
That’s how Tyler Younger, a junior who had known Randolph since his freshman year, found out — from one of those phone calls between teammates.
“I was at home watching TV and Danielle (Beauvais) called,” Younger said. “It didn’t sink in.
I couldn’t make myself believe it. I had just seen him the day before and talked to him.
“It took two or three days to sink in — by the funeral.”
THE HEALING PROCESS
The Cavaliers returned to practice two days after Randolph’s death.
It was a hard day. A quiet day.
“It was like losing a brother, because we’re all like a family,” Younger said. “It was a pretty big hit.
“Everyone was kind of quiet (at practice). I didn’t know what to say. It felt like we were missing a part of us.”
Knowing what his kids were going through, Emerson simply told his team to go out for a run. He told them to run for distance, and at their own pace. He told them to collect their thoughts.
And that is how the healing process began.
The Cavaliers started to wear the ribbons on their jerseys so they could take a little piece of their lost teammate to the line with them. And they dealt with the pain every time a team wanted to do something to honor Randolph in the preseason. At one preseason meet there was a moment of silence, and at another the host team brought in a chaplain to say a few words. Each time though, the good intentions of those teams were like ripping a Band-Aid off the Cavaliers’ emotional wound.
It took until the first regular season meet for the Chatham runners to take their biggest step toward a sense of normalcy, when other teams stopped honoring Randolph and left that up to the Cavaliers themselves.
“It wasn’t until we could just get up and run that we could move forward,” Emerson said.
“Not that we forgot (Randolph). But we didn’t have to relive it then.”
RUNNING THROUGH THE PAIN
Once the Cavaliers could finally just get up and run, they haven’t stopped. (SWITCH “SINCE” FOR “ONCE”) And Randolph has been helping them the whole way — particularly through the memorial ribbon.
“I think of all the good stuff, and what (Randolph) would be saying,” Blackmon said of her thoughts when she runs now. “It makes me go faster and not quit.”
Blackmon is not the only one, either.
“In the race when you want to quit, you feel it like somebody taps you on the shoulder and gives you a boost,” Younger said.
Said Beauvais: “Every race, especially toward the end, I kiss (the ribbon) and ask him and God to give me my second wind and keep going. It is more of a confirmation that he is still with me. That he’s still there watching us and running with us.” (THREE QUOTES IN A ROW IS TOO MUCH. REWRITE THIS LAST ONE IN YOUR OWN WORDS: “TOWARD THE END OF EVERY RACE, BEAUVAIS…”)
Even those who didn’t really get the chance know Randolph still feel his influence. Zach Malpass, a Cavaliers sophomore, was just getting familiar with Vernon when he died.
“(The ribbon) just tells me that we always have an eighth man running with us,” he said.
“It makes me want to fight harder and run through the pain — for him.” (THIS QUOTE IS A BIT WEAK – AND WEAKER STILL, WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT HE ONLY KNEW HIM BRIEFLY. I’D GO WITHOUT IT.)
HONORING THE LOST
Running for Randolph has not only brought the Cavaliers closer together and made them more of a team, but it has also given them a common goal. They want to win for him, too.
And not just smaller races like the Metro meet, which the Chatham boys won and the Cavalier girls finished second (by one point), but the big ones, too.
“We can go to state,” Younger said.
That’s a lofty goal for sure, but with all the Cavaliers have to run for, who can doubt them? (IF YOU WANT TO USE IT, WRITE “TO BE SURE” RATHER THAN “FOR SURE,” WHICH SOUNDS A BIT VALLEY GIRL. BUT I’D AVOID IT. ALSO, YOU’RE NOT CROSSING THE LINE HERE, BUT THE QUESTION IS APPROACHING A COLUMN-Y FEEL.)
Not Emerson, though he also has more immediate plans in mind. He wants his team to win today’s Dogwood District meet at Frasier Farms in Altavista at 3 p.m.
He knows that beating perennial powers Altavista and Nelson County won’t be easy, but if the Cavs can, then he would like to do something special. Emerson wants to give Monica the championship trophy that he says her son deserves.
In a season during which Vernon Randolph Jr. has meant so much to the Cavaliers, handing over the trophy is what Emerson really wants for the kid with the ear-to-ear smile and the will to run.
“That’s just something that I would like to be able to give to her,” Emerson said.
It would mean a lot to Monica, too.
When asked how she felt about Emerson’s plan, the single parent’s emotions finally gave way: “Speechless. Priceless, because they thought more about him to honor him, even though he’s not there.”
But that’s where Monica is wrong. Ask any of the Cavaliers and they will say that Vernon is still with them — in their hearts.
Just like he always will be.



Okay, now some thoughts.

- Good story. I like the structure, the sub-heads, and it starts and ends strongly.

- Okay, here’s what it’s missing. First, non-celebrities typically get pretty dry obituaries, with the occasional sprinkling of “he loved this” or “she always did this.” On a story like this, you can do A LOT to bring out those details. Not to put too fine a point on this, but it’s likely this, other than the official obit, will be the last thing written about this young man. Having said that, I feel like I left the story knowing a few things about him – the singing, the church – but I’m assuming there was a lot more.

That brings me to my main point. You seem to be writing two stories here: one, about a boy who ran cross country, loved to sing, loved God, and made his mother proud; and another about a team coping with this death and hoping for a successful season. Can you see how linking the second story onto the first could – especially in the hands of a more careless writer – seem to cheapen the larger story here?

Also, and this is a bit morbid to dwell on, but your ending troubles me. I appreciate wholly the gesture of the team. And I know how much of an impression that moment – of the mom’s reaction – would have on you in an interview. But to close the story on it almost sets up a “trophy or bust” situation, as though if they DON’T get it, they’re not properly honoring this young man. If they win that meet, it’s a great, great story, and I look foolish for questioning it. If they don’t, then what? They let this kid down? It sounds to me – from the religion aspect- that this is the kind of kid who had much, much larger issues on his mind.

I’m not saying you’ve made big mistakes here. These are just some things you need to be mindful of in stories like this. If your sports ed. looks at some of your copy and tells you to “get more stuff about the team in there,” that’s unfortunate. To me, this is a story about a young man, one who happened to be a dedicated sportsman. In that case, to me, EVERYTHING about him is a part of the story, and it can all run in the Sports section of the paper, including personal and sentimental details -- like the girl calling him the Wal-Mart smiley face, which I thought was the best part -- without any need to bring in the team to “sports it up,” if you follow me. Just tell this kid’s story, sports and non-sports, and bring the team in when, or if, it’s relevant.

Again, good work. Tough subject, tough interviews I imagine. You handled it well.

Thanks for posting. Hope this helps.

- verbal

 

Thank you for the input, Verbal. It was well thought out, and much appreciated.