life at the little league ball park

One of the most experiences I've had since I've been working was tonight when I was sent to cover an 11-year old state championship all star game in Tecumseh. It was quite funny because Wasinger was there shooting photos and upon arriving there he found me in the press box to find out what color was the team wearing that we cared about and I told him and then he whispered to me "well we really dont care about either team" and I quietly laughed.

Thats been one of the interesting points this summer. The former sports editor loves covering all these little league events whereas Sean mainly wants championship games for it only as opposed to having us cover all those games. And most of the writers prefer to not cover little league anyways.

But seeing today's state championship game was nuts and made me imagine what if press was out covering games like this when I was growing up to see some of the crazy embarrasing things that goes in little league sports. Like in the game I was at this girl was pitching and wasn't doing well and her team was already gettin blown out. Well when her coach went to pull her out the game she started crying on the mound and had to be consoled by the catcher and the first baseman. Then when she got moved to left field she was still crying and a coach ran out and talked to her.

Besides that you had a catcher on this South Portage team that couldnt keep her mask on if her life depended on her and it seemed like she had to readjust her glasses after every pitch.

What kinda makes the job more frustrating for someone covering this is this girl from Tecumseh pitched a one-hitter in the four innings the game went on (ended because of the mercry rule with Tecumseh taking a 15-1 victory) didn't even know what to say when i asked her questions about her performance but it was good and her dad(who coached the team) was pretty much standing there telling her what to say.

Needless to say she didn't get quoted in the paper. I know that this happens in the older ranks where you have hard times getting things out of people but thats just one reason why its harder to cover little league stuff. Its a totally different atmosphere and a different level of maturity with the kids.

Needless to say Wasinger and I had an interesting time at the ball park today

In other news:
Hung out with Crystal, Trisha, Bobby and Rob last nite for a bit and made a late night trip to Wally World (Wal Mart) with them which was fun and rather interesting. Everytime I've hung with those people I always have a funny story to tell out of it. but one thing that was pretty cool was I got to play Tecmo Super Bowl for nintendo when I was over there. Its VERY hard gettin used to the limited controls on the nintendo when your used to playing on a PS2 all the time.
In Tecmo Bowl I beat Bobby pretty bad. He took my team (the Lions) which I always used when I played taht game b/c I let Barry Sanders run like crazy. so what I did was I picked Buffalo, remembering that they had Thurman Thomas back in the day. And i beat him pretty bad (like 31-7) and rushed for 200 yds on 20 carries and three TD's with Thurman and held Barry to 15 yards on 15 carries.
That game is seriously one of the things I miss most about nintendo... It was a classic one