Statesman Sports

And now it's over, but it was a nice ride.

After the clock ran out Saturday at Corsicana's Tiger Stadium, and the Bears football season was over, I found myself in a strange situation.

I think I was reacting like a lot of the players, coaches, cheerleaders, band members, Golden Girls, friends, family and fans.

I wasn't ready for it to be over.

It's been awhile since I've dedicated my Friday nights to following a football team. And, this may sound strange, but I got my start in this business because of a high school football team.

My son was something of a jock. One of those kids that wasn't really a star at anything, but was a pretty solid, all-round athlete. It really didn't matter what the sport was, at some point he played it. And some sports he played every season.

His freshman year of high school, Kerens decided to reactivate its athletic booster club after it had been inactive for a few years. My late wife and I joined, just trying to be involved parents.

First meeting was set just a few days before the third football game of that, the 1992, football season. During the meeting the head coach asked for a volunteer to do stats on game night, so he could free up a coach he had assignted to the task.

I volunteered. Hey, I'm kind of a numbers freak so to speak.

Next, the coach asked for someone to write up a small article about the game from Friday night and turn it in to the Kerens Tribune - which didn't have much in the way of sports coverage in those days.

I volunteered.

And that's how I got into the newspaper business.

For the entire `92 football season, I covered the Bobcats ... then, without anyone asking (I'd caught the bug, I guess), I started turning in articles on some of the basketball games.

I was doing all this for free, just as a hobby, I guess.

Come early January, and the guy that owned the paper left a message with my wife.

I came home from the first day at a new job, one that I had already figured out that I didn't like and was probably not going to be very good at.

My wife told me the guy had left a number ... we looked at each other ... and I said, "You think he's going to offer me a job?"

To which she answered, "That's the same thing that crossed my mind."

He did and I became the editor of my hometown newspaper without having any other prior experience other than a few months of freebie sports coverage.

So I started there, turning out (it's a weekly, too) the third issue of January and I've been doing this ever since.

I covered the Bobcats through the 1996 season, took a job at the Corsicana Daily Sun, where I worked through August 2008. I would go back to covering the Bobcats (for the Corsicana paper, this time) in 1997 and continued through 2002, I believe.

So, I've gone through regular seasons of covering a team before. I've covered a lot of playoff games, since Kerens usually makes the playoffs. Helping out the Corsicana newspaper's sports department (I was a news reporter for them) I covered other teams, on occasion, other than Kerens.

I've seen the thrilling wins, blowout wins, the losses that hurt, and the losses that shouldn't have happened (bad referee calls at critical moments).

And I've suffered the letdown at the end of a season of not having the hoopla and real-life pageantry of high school football in Texas.

And I've missed it right away at the end of each of those seasons.

I never expected I'd be in that position again.

But it was fun. To the Bears players, appreciate you putting up with me, guys.