My journalism journey part 19

I had gone from the majestic mountains of Montana to the Great Plains of South Dakota. In other words, flat. But Aberdeen was a friendly place and became my home for the next eight years. It was good to me and I made plenty of friends (and a few enemies, I'm sure). There were lots of stories to write and places to see.
I had grown up a lot in Montana. I recovered my confidence and self-esteem there. I really felt there wasn't much I could not do. Well, I was to find out I had a lot to learn yet.
The first thing I got to cover once I got settled in was the annual high school all-star games. There was girls' and boys' basketball as well as football. I joined a staff of two: sports editor Ron Feickert and one other full-time writer, Matt Schmidt. There was also another part-time writer, Dave Vilhauer, as well as some other part-timers who helped during the school season.
I was to cover high school sports while Matt took care of the local college teams at Northern State University. Dave also covered high school, predominantly Aberdeen Roncalli. Everybody pitched in on the area stuff. But the all-star games, that was a team effort.
We did a lot of feature work leading up to the games and then coverage of the games. I can't remember which game I covered anymore. I had covered so many of those games in my eight years there (although the last year I was on the copy desk). I do know we were very busy that week.
After that, I was trained to run the sports desk. Ron did the desk five days a week, but when he was off, Matt and I did it. I had done my share of paste-up, headline writing, and editing, but it was on smaller papers with not as close of a deadline. The first week was a disaster.
I knew Ron and Cindy Eikamp, the paper's editor, were disappointed in me during that first week of running the desk. I was late every night. Matt was working with me and somehow I heard him snickering as I kept failing. I heard later that he knew I was getting paid more than him, and he didn't like it that a woman was earning more. Well, I had 10 years experience and he was right out of college. Eventually, we would become friends, but it took a while. Right now, in the early going, he wasn't going to lend a hand.
During the third week, I started getting my desk legs under me, so to speak. I got more organized. I got the hang of doing the agate page. I figured out the baseball boxes. This was to be the routine just about everywhere I went. It would take me two to three weeks to settle in before I could get comfortable and start showing those who hired me that I could indeed do the job.
The next big task that we had to do was get the high school fall sports preview together. That was football for the boys and basketball for the girls. This was the second state in which I lived that played girls' basketball in the fall. It would be the bane of my existence: Basketball from August to mid-March. It was one of the reasons I got so sick of basketball. Once I moved to the copy desk and didn't have to cover it anymore, I regained my love of the game again.
Putting together the fall preview meant sending out letters to coaches of all the high schools in our coverage area. We had a form letter we sent out with a fill-out form to return. Our coverage area went north to Oakes, North Dakota, south to Miller, South Dakota, east to the Minnesota border and west to Lemmon, South Dakota. It was a huge area.
When we got the forms back, we typed the information in our computers and compiled the information for the fall preview. We also did some features on players who would be important this season.
Those forms that came back were put in a binder so we could refer to them later in the season. We'd get calls on game nights from coaches, and we had to confirm players' names were spelled right. Sometimes opposing coaches calling in games didn't get the names right. And you wouldn't believe how many different ways there were to spell Aaron or Eric or Jason. Parents were getting very creative naming their kids.
And it wasn't just the boys' names; girls' names were just as bad. Mary became Merrie or Merry or Meri or Mari. Amy became Amie or Aimee. You had to ask for the spelling. It has gotten worse, too.
Our sports team was great on game nights. Friday was busy, of course. We all out covering games. I was at Aberdeen Central games at Swisher Field if they were home. Dave would cover Roncalli and Matt would help man the phones unless he had a college volleyball game to cover.
If our teams were on the road, we would listen to them on the radio. Gene Reich did a lot of the play-by-play for the local radio stations. I'd grab something from McDonald's before the game and go in our conference room with a legal pad, have dinner and cover the game that way. Then I'd wait for the coach to call for quotes. Aberdeen Central's coach at that time, Mark Murphy, often would say, "Well, I don't know. I'll have to see the film." That led to a joke I heard years later of the young coach who got married and returned from his honeymoon. The other coaches asked how the honeymoon was. "Well, guys, I'll have to wait to see the films." Old joke, but it's still funny.
Saturdays were college football days and also sometimes girls' basketball, high school cross country and a mish-mosh of other sports. In the fall, it was a busy time. Most Aberdeen falls were an array of colorful falling leaves and bright blue skies. One year, however, we had a big Halloween blizzard. It was South Dakota: you could never predict the weather.
I covered lots of football games in South Dakota, dealt with a lot of coaches who thought it was an interesting novelty to see a woman writing sports. That was something I had to deal with most of my career, but especially in Montana and South Dakota. More about that in part 20.