Sports job brings old Bulldog full circle

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Since starting here at the BCR a few weeks ago I’ve been in a virtual time machine, transported back to my (not so) glorious athletic career at Ohio High School, where I graduated in 1998. While the various gyms I have entered have sparked some recollections, more often than not it’s the rides to them that gets the memories flowing.

In a small school like Ohio, there was not a ton of extra-curricular activities, so sports were nearly required for an active social life. This was especially true for a farm boy like me, who was isolated from his in-town counterparts. I ran cross country in the fall, played basketball and chess in the winter, and gave track a try for a couple years in the spring, which kept me busy and out of trouble for the most part.

Looking back, I remember the long bus rides chatting with friends on the way to and from games just as much as the games themselves. Sports were far more than just competition to me, they were about a sense of belonging, camaraderie. The bus is where a lot of that came together.

The other day I was driving to DePue to take a picture of their basketball teams, and I was reconnected with memories of joking around on the way to a game against the Little Giants. I couldn’t tell you who won the game that night, but I could remember the conversation, which as could often be the case for high school boys, was a bit too blue to run in the newspaper.

Thinking back on other high school sports memories, I consistently return to the bus. It was many things to me and my teammates: a karaoke bar as we sang Meatloaf coming back from a chess meet, a makeshift locker room when we changed out of soaking clothes after running in a torrential rainstorm. Sometimes (not often) the bus was as somber as a funeral parlor, when a coach commanded that there be silence following a particularly disappointing loss. Those were the kinds of rides where “you could count every cornstalk on the way back home” as one coach so marvelously phrased it.

Now that I’m covering the sports that years ago I participated in, I have a larger sense of what role they play in the social fabric of not only the kids, but the adults who support them. Sports have always been more about coming together than competition here in the small towns of north central Illinois.

So get out and chat with your neighbors at the local ball game (say hi if you see me, I’ll be the skinny guy taking pictures and scribbling down notes), and by all means give a friendly honk when you pass a school bus on the road at night.

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