Sports junkie looks forward to fall season

Three months into my new gig as the Herald's sports reporter, I finally have a chance to write for the most bizarrely diverse space in the newspaper.

We've read about the virtues of Avril Lavigne, the exotic flavor of the grapefruit mocha, and the shamefulness of leaving the toilet seat up. I'm sure there's been plenty of weirdness in years past.

I could try to be as out there as some other personalities who shall remain nameless, but combining comedy and journalism has never been my forte.

So I'll talk about what got me here — sports.

After nearly five years of covering prep sports, the beauty and simplicity of high school athletics never fails to amaze me. Yes, I'm a hopeless junkie for sports in all its forms — I could watch 12 consecutive hours of college football on Saturday afternoons and never move from the sofa, if I had a refrigerator and a commode in the living room — but there's something truly enjoyable about watching teenagers compete with each other.

I've had the pleasure of watching a Mat Classic championship alongside thousands under the Tacoma Dome, the thrill of seeing a basketball team mob each other after its state title, and the pit of sympathy in my stomach as a softball team favored to go to state shed tears because their season was over.

The emotions we see in high school sports are just as real and heartfelt as any we'd see during the Super Bowl, the World Series or the Final Four. Obviously, the kids, the coaches and the parents all want to win.

But there's still the underlying ideal that high school sports teach lifelong lessons of fair play, camaraderie and hard work. Those are qualities that often disappear when watching say, Ray Lewis shimmy his way onto the field or Lou Piniella humiliate yet another umpire. True, those things might be entertaining, but they're not exactly the model behavior we want our kids to emulate.

Ninety-nine percent of the high school coaches I've worked with over the years are concerned about more than winning. They make sure their kids hustle. They admonish them for showing up their opponents. They don't hesitate to suspend them if their grades aren't up to par.

I've resided in the Columbia Basin for less than 90 days, but I can already gauge the passion people here have for high school sports. My hope is to make our sports pages reflect that passion, from game stories to action photos to personality features and more.

As the summer slowly shrinks into oblivion and the first fall sports practices get under way, you'll see that sense of anticipation in the Columbia Basin Herald's sports section. Our next major project is the annual gridiron guide. I'm already looking forward to meeting coaches and players, getting to know what makes these young men and women tick.

You'll never take the maniacal hockey fan out of me — I still love going to the occasional Spokane Chiefs game and cheering on the junior team I grew up with. I have to have my SportsCenter on a daily basis, and my growing DVD collection has a respectable selection of sports movies, including "Field of Dreams," "Rudy" and "Jerry Maguire." (My wife keeps trying to convince me "Jerry Maguire" is a chick flick, but I'm not budging.)

Hopefully, these things project the idea that I'm nerdy about sports the same way Anthony Michael Hall's character in "Sixteen Candles" was nerdy about girls. I'll take it any way I can get it.

But when I want to return to the roots of what makes sports great — pure competition — high school sports are where it's at.

Neil Pierson is the Columbia Basin Herald's sports reporter. He still has the tape of Game 6 of the 1993 World Series and Joe Carter's game-winning home run.