Dear Parents of High School Athletes

Dear Parents of High School Athletes,

We appreciate your enthusiasm and school spirit. We also understand you love your kids very much and are very proud of them and their athletic achievements. However, just because you are convinced your kid is the next Lebron or LT or A-Rod (minus the steroids, of course) doesn't mean we can be in ten different places at once. I for one, somewhat enjoy covering high school sports, especially good ones, but I become less than enthusiastic when rude, pompous, arrogant parents call or email with complaints. Not just any complaints, but rants about how we don't cover their precious kids team enough. It is especially infuriating when they incorrectly accuse me or my colleagues of not attending an important game when we were, in fact, there. Just because you (parent) weren't at the game or somehow missed me and my 30 pound camera under the hoop your kids were shooting to doesn't mean I wasn't there. Also, just because you missed our coverage or highlights on the nightly news doesn't mean it didn't make it on the air. Oh, and a few more things, you should feel grateful you live in a small market and the local station gives a you know what about prep sports. We know the prep stuff is a big and important part of what we cover and we don't mind doing it. However, keep in mind a small market station also means a small staff that is typically overworked and underpaid. Bottom line: before you bitch and moan try to understand and appreciate what we do and the time and effort we put into it. We do the best we can with the resources we're given. Try calling and emailing your coaches instead. They have to cooperate with us if we're going to be able to work with them. It does us no good to cover a team with a coach who doesn't give us the schedule, roster or call in scores or give us a contact number. It doesn't make much sense for us to run highlights of a game without the final score or names of the players now does it? Also, do your kids even care if they're on TV? Probably not. They're probably much more interested in your interest in their games, not ours. And another thing, (this is slightly off topic), but in any case worth mentioning...parents, quite with the fighting at games. You should be setting an example for your kids and teaching them sportsmanship not that it's ok to punch someone who doesn't agree with you. Let the refs do their jobs. I know refs don't always make the best or right call, but there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Also, it's not the Super Bowl or the World Series...remember-it's just high school.

Introduction to The Car Wash Chronicles

My first gig out of college was with a small TV station in Morgan City, Louisiana. I was the sports director and as it was pointed out, the sports director by default because I was the only sports person. For those of you not familiar with South Louisiana, Morgan City is down in 'da bayou. Being from Houston people always asked if it was a culture shock to be working in the home of the annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, but it wasn't. I went to LSU and gradually became accustomed to life in the Bayou State, so the transition was not so difficult. My first love will always be Texas, but I have adopted Louisiana as my new home. Anyways, enough background. You're probably wondering why this blog is called "The Car Wash Chronicles." The station in Morgan City was conveniently located next to a self-service car wash. The car wash was also the location of choice for suspected drug dealers and other colorful characters. One day I walked out to the parking lot saw two gentlemen dressed in full haz-mat gear cleaning out an old beat up car. My first thought was did they just murder someone and dispose of a body? Or maybe they were cooking meth (rolling meth labs were not uncommon to hear about in our coverage area)? Whatever they were doing it was unusual. These were the kinds of strange things we witnessed on a regular basis outside of the station at the car wash. My coworkers and I always thought we should install a camera pointing toward the car wash to catch drug deals going down. After all, they happened incredibly blatantly. I've never seen a drug deal go down so for me to look across the parking lot and totally know what's going on that's obvious. I have since moved on from Morgan City and now I'm the weekend sports anchor and reporter at a station in Alexandria, LA. The new job has brought on all kinds of new responsibilities and a whole host of characters for me to write about. Looking forward to blogging about my experiences as an aspiring sports reporter and all the crazy things that come with the job!