Preps, again

Sometimes I take covering professional and international soccer for granted. If I am working on a feature on, say, Jesse Marsch or Peter Vagenas, I can call Keegan Pierce or Patrick Donnelly and usually something can be worked out via phone.

Not so much with high school soccer. I filled in again for the PE's soccer writer on Monday on one of the busiest high school soccer days of the year. The playoff pairings were released so there were a lot of local schools that reached the postseason and I had to try and hit some of the better teams' coaches. Now, i don't cover that beat so I had little to work with but I managed to talk to Temecula Valley coach Adam Skumawitz who was very gracious with his time and had a nice little conversation with him. I spent the rest of the day tracking down coaches and athletic directors with no success. It didn't help that Monday was a holiday for most school districts, which only further complicated the matter. So I only tracked down Riverside King coach Todd Mapes.

But undoubtedly the worst part of the whole day was typing in all the agate. Holy crap. I started out in my journalism career as an agate clerk for the San Bernardino County Sun back in 1997. That was cool. It really helped me learn how a sports department works from the ground up because I was at the ground level. It also helped me to learn how to type fast. I can type at about 60-70 words a minute, sometimes faster (if I'm on deadline at Home Depot Center after a game for instance). But yesterday was something else. I literally had to type in all brackets for 10 divisions. That took all stinking day. By the time I filed (I started chasing the stories at about 12:30 and filed everything at 9 p.m.) I was so tired that I fell asleep in my recliner.

Anyway, the Temecula Valley girls will be tough to beat and Riverside King boys face a stiff test.

And check out what I typed up with regards to the agate. Starting with the Rialto Eisenhower-Lake Elsinore Temescal Canyon game, all the way down, I typed all that in. Whew.