Dear dimwit on the phone

She probably just knew she had already peaked. It seems like around here, female cross-country runners are outstanding as freshmen and sophomores and then drop off their junior and senior years. The league meet and Regional results every year seem to have a sophomore or freshman in seven or eight of the top 10 spots with one of them almost always the winner.

 

Puberty.

 

In Michigan, you can compete as an eighth-grader only if your school is a small Class D, you're not in hockey or football and your stats from eighth grade don't count toward career records since students in other schools may not have had the same opportunity.

So, the question is "When is a 1,000 point scorer not a 1,000 point scorer?" A former editor of mine pointed that out at a small school with a high Native American population and got called a racist for it.

 

Those...Nimrods!

 

Nice...

In the silly state, seventh grade is where you can start

 

on the squeaky wheel front....
This local tennis instructor always floods us with "angles" trying to get coverage for his private sessions. We'll run results if his club holds a tournament or something, but nothing more than a brief. But the guy is relentless. The latest is that he has a pair of twins that he's coaching and he compares it to all the famous twins that have ever broken pro. My thought...okay, when these twins you're talking about go pro call me back

Well, I come to find out that he's been pestering numerous people at the office to get this "big story" into the paper. I end up out sick a couple days this week and find out the guy dropped by the office to make his case. Just to get the guy off his back our editor relents and says something will get into the paper.

My mandate upon finding out..."Okay, but no more than two paragraphs...this is a Sideline item at best"

There is no amount of oil that will make this guy's squeak stop.

 

You should dig through your archives on any stories you did on this guy in the past, research the players he was promoting back then, look them up now and throw that into your next story on him.

"Marty McFly says that the Podunk twins are the best tennis players he's ever coached and, considering that he's been in the business for 40 years and only had one player play more than one pro match, that's pretty high praise."

 

So, your daughter plays volleyball, does she? She had a good season? Did she win any awards -- from the conference or the school? No? How about the team? What was its record this season? Hmm, 5-16. Oh, but she's from around here? Let me look at the roster. You see, this is a community college team, and 98 percent of the players on the team are from around here.

So, basically, your daughter had an average season on a below-average team. Sorry, we will not be including her in our college roundup.

 

Local karate school owner is like that. Every once in a while -- like two or three years -- we found a good angle on a story he was pitching. Then, he would start hounding the poor guy who wrote the story for the next few years until something interesting would pop up. Then he would start badgering the next guy.

 

As far as I know, seventh- and eighth-graders can compete anywhere in New York as long as they go through selective classification testing to confirm they have the physical skills and emotional maturity to play at that level. Girls cross country, gymnastics and tennis are loaded with quality junior-high competitors.

 

Don't know if it's still this way in Iowa, but when I was growing up there (graduated high school in 1987), eighth graders could play high school baseball and softball.
The high school baseball and softball seasons are in the summer and the reasoning was that once a kid "graduated" from eighth grade, he/or she was a high schooler.
I got to play five years of high school baseball that way.

 

Still can do it. We've had some softball pitchers who have been five-year starters.