An update and some rock

(No, this has nothing to do with newspapers but Katherine said she liked my "non-sequitur" rock videos that are attached to the posts I do, so I'm gonna keep doing them).

I'm a swingman at the new paper. I've been doing nothing but sports for about two months but when our sports editor returns from the job he was at and didn't like as much I'll be going back to doing a combination of sports and local pages (markets, farm, society, church, etc.) on Monday through Thursdays and a full time designer/copy editor on Fridays. Which means I have weekends off again. Awesome.

But for now, I'm on sports full time. And I've been covering a lot of fall baseball — since in Illinois, many of the small farm schools we cover have 150 students or less and just don't have enough bodies for football.

Hence this story on the National Trail Conference baseball tournament. (There are some errors... because of a problem we've been having with uploading to the Web straight from the Newsedit document instead of the final proofed pages. I'm working on setting this straight...)

I've also done some soccer, a bunch of volleyball and have taken photos at all the Effingham High home football games.

You'll also be interested to know just how many insults are exchanged in the comments section of our sports articles. Mostly it's Effingham fans calling Newton pansies, but the Eagle fans get a few zingers now and again.

Wednesday will find me covering a semifinal matchup in the baseball tournament between the defending Class 2A state champions and another school who's pretty decent. The champs have been beating people this fall by an average score of 10-0, and they have a legitimate Division I prospect for a pitcher. Yeah, they're pretty good and will be a definite favorite to repeat this year. (Teutopolis, or "T-town" if you want to be in the know on East-Central Illinois place name slang, has about 450 students and probabaly COULD have a football team... but I think they just like being really good at baseball and don't want to spend the money on football, which is understandable.)

Finally, this might be a stupid question to ask, but do any other Collegian alumns cover sports at all? I know Tony's done a few oneoffs here and there but other than that I think I'm the only one. If there IS someone else out there that has done some or is doing some... I'd like to hear from you and we can talk shop.