Third District tournament softball pitchers

Pictures from the Third District tournament I covered tonight.


Alexis Rodgers, Ballard Memorial


Samantha Mullins, Graves County


Jaclyn McCuiston, Mayfield


Carli Cummins, St. Mary

Run, Oscar! Run!

Oscar Pistorious was earlier denied the right to attempt to qualify for the Olympics.

The 21-year-old South African sprinter wasn't a druggie and had no record of steroid use. His apparent flaw was that he didn't have feet.

Pistorious, a double-amputee, runs with carbon fiber blades that connect to his knees. He has competed in the Paralympics and holds the 400-meter world record of 46.56 seconds. The International Association of Athletics Federations originally ruled that the blades would give him a competitive advantage against able-bodied athletes.

He appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which ruled that no proof of an advantage existed. A team at MIT proved that the Cheetah Flex Foot he wears do not give him an advantage.

Now, he has the opportunity to qualify for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. If he doesn't qualify this year, he has a chance of being selected as a member of the South African 1,600 meter relay team, or he can still work to qualify for the 2012 Olympics.

I'm just shocked this was ever an issue. Pistorious' time of 46.56 in the 400 is just a second off the Olympic minimum standard, despite being without feet and fibulae.

Do his J-shaped legs give him an advantage? Absolutely not. The only way he would have an advantage is if they were strapped on to turbo boosters or jet engines.

So run, Oscar, run. Show the world what you can do.

A thousand words

For the third year in a row, the Reidland softball team won the All A Classic on Saturday in Jeffersontown, Ky.



Reidland pitcher Cassee Layne was horrified at the thought these photos could make it into the paper product of The Paducah Sun. I somewhat appeased her fear by telling her they would wind up on my blog, which is on the WORLD Wide Web.

In what I would like to call a freak accident, Layne stretched a ligament in her foot the day before leaving for the All A Classic state tournament (which Reidland won). She was still needed to pitch, so she decided to tread lightly and hold back Saturday. All 51 strikeouts worth (26 innings).

Reidland's road thus far...

In Jeffersontown —

Reidland has won its first two games — against Walton-Verona, 8-1, and against Model, 4-0.

Against Model, Reidland pitcher Cassee Layne struck out 16, taking her total to 24 for the day. Against WV, junior varsity pitcher Jasmine Matchen threw the last two innings of the game in only her second varsity outing. After working out the nerves, she retired four batters, issued two walks and allowed one run with one hit.

What was supposed to be a two-day tournament has now turned into a one-day marathon, with the championship game slated to begin at 9 p.m. The tournament was reorganized due to impending doom and rain on Sunday. Reidland plays next at 5:30 p.m. (All times Eastern).

Non-softball related....There is a Moe's a mere mile away from my hotel that I found after scouting the locations on the Internet. Moe's Southwest Grill is my all-time favorite fastfood joint — a healthy option and a unique spin on Subway, only TexMex. I've already eaten there once today, and a second time is a strong possibility unless I can find a Panera Bread Co.

If I ever become independently wealthy, you can bet one of the two franchises will be coming to Paducah. If you are independently wealthy and want to bring one or both of the franchises to Paducah, my daily proceeds will likely meet your profit quota.

-Cheers.

A design mind

Designing is not my forté. I do it, however, to make myself marketable in a highly competitive job market.

At The Sun, when I am on "slot" (another name for the sports design desk), it usually means someone is on vacation. In this case, editor Steve Millizer took his week-long break, so I had to substitute Wednesday and Thursday for page designer Greg Stark's days off.

Wednesday nights for a designer are usually smooth sailing. Since Wednesday nights are historically reserved for church and religious times, high school athletics have largely taken the night off. We do get call-ins for some games, but the night is normally not too hectic.

Thursday night, I was ready, but it still wasn't enough. I had five pages to take care of, which is more than I usually have been asked to design. And then, as per the editor's request, I had to try and find photos to go with all of the stories.

If you are not a design person, or interested in the process, then you probably already stopped reading ages ago, and that's OK. You're not reading this.

But for those of you who have some design experience, you know the more items you need to include on a page means more time.

I had 12 photos, one logo and one graphic to place on the pages. This means tweaking sizes of the boxes and the photos, making sure the subject will appear as we want it to in the morning. Then we have to tweak the cutline, or caption, information. I have to change the fonts and resize the boxes. It's tedious, especially when all the boxes have to fit together in one rectangular page.

Then, for the local sports roundups, I had extra work to do. We had plenty of call-ins and lots of information to put together. Those little agate lines, the teeny, tiny lines for scores, don't just happen that way magically. Each box score must be formatted upon its arrival on my page. We do as much as we can to prepare for the boxes, but you always have to line things up once the scores come in. And for that part of the paper, you are most always up against deadline. Games end late, and we wait for the calls. And with our extra-early 10:30 p.m. deadline because of the new press, things get dicey.

While you are designing, you are taking these calls. Jon Futrell helps with the calls, but the designer inevitably has to answer some. And while you are designing, you must keep up with sending the pages down to the press room so they can take care of that operation. You write headlines and edit the stories. It's tough.

I spent the night glued to my chair, eyes never leaving the screen, to get things done on time. I had a bottle of Tums by my side, ready to battle the stress that was boiling up.

And then I made what I consider a very gross error: I spelled a guy's name wrong.

It was my fault, my story. The one I had written earlier that day.

I discovered the error this afternoon and about vomited. I thought an "i" was supposed to be a "y". It wasn't. I even put the name in the headline.

Reporters, editors and designers don't like mistakes. When we make mistakes, we look like idiots, and you the reader lose trust. That's why we edit things before they go into the paper and ask good questions.

I just didn't ask the right question.

So Friday afternoon, instead of furiously checking my photos to make sure tiny black lines bordered every one of them, or if I got in all the scores, I had to bemoan my mistake.

I feel awful. I apologize. I'll never spell his name wrong again.

I'll remember to always ask how you spell your name, even if it's the simple "Smith" or "Jones". Twice. Three times.

And I won't have to design for another six months!

Bonjour!

I ate my Pop-Tarts while watching SportsCenter yesterday morning.

This is a far cry from how last week’s mornings were spent.

Last week I was eating fresh baked brioche and croissants covered in fresh butter and preserves for breakfast while conversing with friends in a foreign country that had never heard of SportsCenter, let alone broadcast it.

Last week, I was in France on a dream vacation (hence the absence of my byline from The Sun). One that included about three minutes of anything sports related.

My three minutes of sports included a drive by the Stade de France, an 80,000 capacity stadium that houses the French rugby and football (soccer) teams. Then I caught about 20 seconds of football clips on the French-speaking news station.

And I wasn’t even trying to isolate myself from sports.

The French culture does not put such a high value on sports like the U.S. does. The papers might have a page, at most, of sports coverage, not entire sections like we do.

For the most part, schools don’t put an emphasis on athletic extra-curricular activity. There are no basketball teams competing for district titles, no baseball teams running bases and certainly no dirt track racing.

A French native I spent a good deal of time with this week said her high school, which is considerably different than one in the U.S., had a fairly prestigious rugby team., which, again, was unusual for French schools. Her focus growing up had been spent on learning: She knows three languages, and is studying to become a journalist, which I understand to be a prestigious and hard-to-achieve status in France.

I did come to know that the French football team in Marseille, the Olympique de Marseille, is a pretty big deal. Say one word against it in a bistro and you might get knifed.

But other than the world fetish of football that the U.S. still has yet to grasp, I was without sports (which wasn’t a bad thing at all for me while on vacation).

Now that I am back in the U.S., I am amazed to see how much of sports consume my life, despite being the main theme behind my profession. I can’t drive five miles in any direction without coming into contact with it in any way.

Rolling into Reidland, Lone Oak, and Calloway County are highway signs proclaiming state champions of some sort. In France, signs like that might say, “Aix en Provence: Home of Paul Cézanne.” (He’s a famous Impressionist painter for the curious)

I’m not complaining, and I’m not praising. It’s just one of many cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries.

****

One of the highlights of my trip was touring the principality of Monaco, which just happened to be setting up for the 79th Monaco Grand Prix.




Monaco is an affluent “country” surrounded by France and the Mediterranean Sea that speaks French, is defended by the French and whose football team competes in the French National Championship. But it’s not in France.

Anyway, traipsing along the streets of Monte Carlo, we discovered all sorts of barriers being put up and construction. Upon further inspection, the barriers were for safety and the sides of the streets were painted with red and white stripes for boundaries. The grandstands were being built on top of store fronts and banners were everywhere advertising for the May 25 race.



The famous Grand Prix snakes through the city and is thought to be one of the most dangerous courses in the world. The streets are narrow, the course has a tunnel and two drivers have lost their lives when they tumbled off the course and into the sea.

Formula 1 might not be my kind of racing, but even I can salivate over one of the coolest events in motorsports history.

Media's madness about women's athletics

As of 1:00 p.m. on the front page of espn.com, there is nothing about the National Championship game that was played on Tuesday night.

If you got all of your sports news from espn.com, you would likely have missed the women’s NCAA National Championship game entirely last night.

I’m more than mad with what our media has done to help the cause of women’s basketball and women’s sports in general.

For the men’s NCAA National Championship game, days were spent giving credence to the two teams involved: Kansas and Memphis. Espn.com designed a whole new top to its front page, involving cutout pictures of players and coaches as a preview to Monday night’s game.

The next day, Tuesday, the day of the women’s NCAA National Championship game, a feature story on Tiger Woods’ caddie took up the main story spot nearly all day on the Web site. The women’s game preview didn’t show up prominently until about three hours before game time. No fancy headlines. No fancy cutout photos. No extra fanfare.

And now, at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, there is not even one headline link to a story about last night’s game. That was not the case yesterday reporting on the men’s game.

The women’s game was shown on ESPN. The men’s game was shown on the CBS network. My parents, along with countless other people in the world, still don’t have cable or satellite and were barely aware the game was even going on.

I watched the game, and also watched all the promos for ESPN. The cable network actually split-screened for a moment, coming out of a timeout, to highlight Manny Ramirez as he ran the bases to score for the Red Sox on a Placido Polanco error.

Millions of people would have killed CBS had they split-screened to highlight a promo for the nightly news. But apparently since it’s a women’s game, it’s OK to show some disrespect.

Best plays of the day that night on ESPN’s highlights did not include a single play from the women’s championship game. Instead, we watched two highlights for foreign soccer.

And it’s not just this Web site that has me mad, it’s the whole media and pop culture surrounding the sport. It’s the people who still come at me saying they’d rather watch “paint dry” than a women’s or girls’ basketball game.

Sports Illustrated has a link for Tennessee’s title game, as the third in a list of the top stories. An NFL mock draft and NHL previews headline the top feature spot.

Do we have office pools fixed on the women’s bracket? Of course not.

Where is all the fanfare for Tennessee coach Pat Summitt’s eighth National Championship? She is only two away from tying John Wooden’s collection of 10 while at UCLA. The program is one of a handful that has won back-to-back titles.

I’m more than bitter. I’m mad. The disparity has gotten better with time, no doubt, and I applaud that. And when you think of other women’s sports that get no media coverage on any level, that bristles my feathers, too.

It starts with the fans, people. Start buying tickets and going to games. Please prove to the media that women’s basketball is something to get behind. Because when the people want it, the media generally responds.