NHL, Swim meet aggravation

If I were Don Maloney, Tom Renney, and Mr. Sather, I'd get on the phone with Gary Bettman and beg him to outlaw 4-on-4 hockey. No more overtimes! Let's go straight to the shootout! Who needs 4 on 4 overtime?!

All in all, 4 points in the first 3 games is not bad for the New York Pain-gers. Now they've got Atlanta coming up soon and they just signed Kovalchuk to a new contract. Not a good omen. At least they don't have Heatley anymore. Boy he used to hammer the Rangers.

I just covered a swim meet today at St. Charles North H.S. It was a big meet with 6 of the top 15 teams in Illinois competing. So I'm covering it and got there around 1:00 p.m. Right before the last event, I go to the scorer's table and ask about the team standings. They tell me Stevenson (a school nowehre near us but in the Daily Herald's coverage area) is winning. And there's no way for Neuqua Valley (another school not in our zone but definitely in the coverage area) to overpass them. At the end of the meet, they announce Stevenson as the winners. And they promised me they'd fax me the team results as they always do after a big meet. So after 3 hours in a burning hot pool area, I go outside ionto the 40 degree cold of suburban Chicago.

I drive to the office and get there around 4:15. I start working and I realize fast there's aboat load of tournaments to cover. Volleyball, cross country (I got 28 pages one cross country meet that only ONE of our local teams was running in!), tennis, on and on. Never mind that the other zones are grossly understaffed, which slows them down. When they can't get get the scores into the computer that I need to copy into my scoreboard, it slows us down. I understand that. But SCN never faxed me the information! So I can hardly get my story going. I had a few results written down, but nowhere near what I needed to hammer this thing out. I find the results around 7:30 in another agate. Only Neuqua is first and Stevenson is second. Red flag shoots up. Heck, they announced Stevenson had won. What happened?

Turns out, they counted wrong and announced the wrong team as winners. So most of my interview questions with these two teams are almost irrelevant since the standings have switched. I did get a good article out, but it took until abour 8:30 to finish. I'll have it posted this week. And remeber when you read it, you got the story behind the scenes, courtesy of the People's Writer.