Cutter: Day 1

The first day of the high school sports season is officially on Wednesday. However, the first day of the high school sports season for me is today.

This marks my return from the hiatuses that were needed to both construct this new version of Northern Illinois Sports Beat, and to improve on areas in my personal life. Needless to say, last year was an abbreviated one for me, taking the entire months of December, April, May and July off, as well as several chunks of other months. All of which comes to and end today and I hope to have no more of these long breaks this year.

Since today starts my first day back from "vacation," I thought I'd give everyone a look at what I call "Day 1" in the NISB Office. That day is spent getting ready for the upcoming sports season. This particular "Day 1" is different because I've spent little or no time thinking about preparations for the upcoming year (that is what a vacation is, right?).

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As a late riser, I wake up at 8:45 a.m. Most people that wake up at that time are likely trying to hurry up and dart out the front door on their way to work. Not me. Instead, I slowly walk the 15 feet from the foot of the bed to the NISB Office, making it before 9 a.m.

After a check of the usual things (messages, Facebook, etc.), it is time to start "Day 1" of the 10th season of Northern Illinois Sports Beat.

The first thing I do is to get out the pocket planner and fill up as many dates as I possibly can. Before I do this, I need to fill up personal dates, work dates and side-writing-opportunity dates (see here). This process involves reviewing who the top fall sports teams will be, in my opinion, for this year. For example, Keith Country Day and Dakota's volleyball teams obviously.

I create a list of the top five (known only to me because I don't want to jinx anyone) fall sports teams for each sport. Since there are nine sports in the fall - boys and girls cross country, football, boys and girls golf, boys soccer, girls swimming and diving, girls tennis and volleyball - I have a sheet in front of me with 45 teams on it. I don't rank them one-through-five. That gives me a feel for what teams to focus on early in the year.

Next up is to find the schedules for these 45 teams. The football schedules are easy to find, as they are right there on the IHSA website. Finding the other 40 schedules takes some work. In the past, this part of the job was as quick as a visit to the old highschoolsports.net - that was before it merged with USA Today and became a huge mess. These days, this task involves digging through Athletics2000 (or 8 to 18, whatever it's called now) and school-based websites.

When it comes to the point where I pound my fist on my desk because I can't find the schedule, I have to write down "email" next to the team as a sign for me to email the school's athletics director. Quite a few on this year's list.

Using what I have already, I switch from the pen to the pencil to fill in important dates that I am able to attend. The first date, August 14, is filled with a football practice in the morning. This occurs before a cross country practice later in the day, which is before a shift at my full-time job. Another date immediately filled on the calendar, as has been the case for a couple of years now, has been the Boylan Golf Invitational on August 19. With an 8 a.m. shotgun start, this represents the very first moments of actual competition for the 2013-14 high school sports year.

Next comes August 30, the first week of the high school football season. For this occasion only, I take a gander at the master area football schedule and find what I believe are the 10 best games in the area. Seems like a really tough list to fill up this season. I eventually settled on a game that I wouldn't normally cover in years past. Not only did I fill that date, I also filled the following Saturday for another fotball game.

With my appearances throughout northern Illinois finalized, I now determine just how I will be covering these events. I can cover these events in a multitude of ways, as well as do multiple items with each appearance. (Before I go any further with this, I need to make sure my camera and my video camera are operable and ready for the year). Sifting through my planner, I put away the pencil and bring out the red pen. For the first couple of weeks only, I write down the content schedule for the website.

One of the personal decisions that I made during these hiatuses was to create more time to personal life (mostly with family and friends). In years past, it seemed like every day was spent writing at least one story and partially writing on a couple of others. So I decided to set aside one or two days out of the week to do mass typing and uploading of content. With this new Blog format, I am able to schedule content items on future dates and have them automatically published on these dates. This is all in accordance to a goal I have for this website to have something new every day.

Next up is the budget.

(Do you really think I'm going to give away budget specifics on here?)

Next up is the finite specifics of what I plan to work on tomorrow; which is the last day for a while that I will not be working, covering an event, or spending time with family and friends.

Another check of the email led me to an apparent error on one of the website pages involving the number of state titles won by the Winnebago Boys Cross Country team. After replying to the person, that made me think of the many areas of website-related cleanup and updating that I need to do. That will be first thing tomorrow.

I have this column brewing in my mind that I hope the lay the groundwork on tomorrow. In addition, there is a held-over story from this past spring that I will finally get around to and have published. That's when I also thought of the idea to write this little thing you are reading right now.

So ends "Day 1" for the Publisher of Northern Illinois Sports Beat. "Day 2", one of those mass-typing days, will be spent locked away in the office with plenty of caffeine to keep things going.

I have to get ready for my full-time job right now.

(Update: When I originally published this entry, it came out in one lumpy paragraph for some reason. Now I have to put in HTML page breaks. This stinks.)