Friday, 11 April 2008 10:13 by
Dave It’s not often I read a story online and think “Wow”. But I’d been out of town earlier this week, and in catching up with my reading, I came across LoudounExtra.com’s Loudoun’s Winter Wonders, which shows their all-star teams for all winter sports.
It’s not that the material is earth-shattering; it’s just that the logistics and resources needed to put something like this together are substantial. It’s one thing to name all-area football or basketball teams, as getting to see games involving those athletes is pretty easy. We televised about a dozen football games and close to 20 basketball games on Comcast this season, so between Comcast and watching live, you could get a feel for the best players in those sports.
But to come up with the details of all the other sports: boys swimming, girls swimming, wrestling, gymnastics and ice hockey…that’s a lot of athletes to consider, a lot of coaches to call, and a lot of results to tally. Then to get the winners together in a central place, take pictures, and write up the winners in a format that does not take weeks to read…
As one commercial used to say, it’s like “herding cats.”
Loudounextra.com, by virtue of being part of The Washington Post empire, has the resources to devote to such a section. It’s just as impressive day-in and day-out to read the scores and detail of every game in every sport on Loudounprepsports.com because the staff, ownership, clean-up crew, writer and editor is the same guy: Dan Sousa.
I like local sports, but I’m basically a football and basketball man. Dan’s committed. And when he’s fielding calls from 27 coaches every day to get every last lacrosse and field hockey score, he probably feels like he should be committed. It’s probably why he picked UCLA to win the NCAA Tournament.
But I digress.
In the bigger scheme of things, these local all-star teams probably mean little. But it does add to the sense of community out here in Loudoun County. I’ve lived in small towns, where a local weekly newspaper made a big deal of any scholastic success; I’ve also lived in bigger cities, where unless you were heading for the big-time, the bigger daily newspaper in town didn’t write about it. We’re lucky enough to get the best of both worlds.
So to Jeff Nelson, Paul Tenorio, Joel Richardson, J.C. Reed, Christian Swezey and Cara McCoy, nice job. Now that you’re done with this project, perhaps you can tackle a bigger challenge: helping Tenorio with next year’s NCAA basketball picks.
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