Nightmarish weekend

Nightmare... now that's a word that makes you think, "Oh-my-gosh-what-the-heck-happened-to-David-and-where-should-we-send-financia-lsupport-or-perhaps-just-a-12-pack-of-Guinness?"

Girls high school tennis happened. LPGA golf happened.

Due to my vastly inferior knowledge about what events are important around here yet, we didn't have anyone around to cover the all-important Delaware County Girls Tennis Tournament today. And, because of my vastly inferior knowledge of how to say no to my boss, I'd already put myself down to cover the LPGA Tour stop in Dublin for the Wendy's Championship for Children on Thursday and Sunday.

In short, this is the absolute worst combination of things to cover that I can imagine. Maybe we could throw in a house fire from my intern days in between.

I'm not going to devalue these sports as a whole. Not right now at least. But I will rip on the difficulty in watching them and understanding what's happening.

We'll start with the golf first. A golf course covers perhaps 10 acres of land, all with little paths connecting each of the 18 holes. The players are moving along the course at an unknown rate of speed, in groups of three or so. There's really no telling where they might be. If you know where they are, there's no telling where they might be by the time you find that hole. If you find them, there's no guarantee that the player you've gone to watch will do anything interesting on the holes you follow along. And, oh yeah, while you're gone there's a chance the Tour officials will bring someone into the media center for an interview, so you'd miss that.

Thus you get some of the laziest good journalism I've ever seen. There are a number of golf writers [and NASCAR's the same, I'm told] who simply sit in the media center, watching TV, paying some attention to the boards on the wall that explain what's happening and then running into a press conference to gather quotes.

In short, they're covering a sport they're not really watching, just monitoring.

That's also my gripe with covering the tennis. The tournament locale today was just down the street, so they get high marks for my personal convenience. But there are eight matches going on at the same time. You can go look at the tournament official's cheat sheet to see which pairing might be what, but then you might miss something more interesting down the line.

Oddly enough, both of these sports force you to follow the favorite. You have to guess who you think might work and pray you won't miss out on seeing the real winner altogether.

Never mind writing about this stuff... it's all in cliches and terminology that typical people just don't understand. Heck, I'm in the sports realm and only understand it partially. This won't help people get interested in your sport which hasn't reached the mainstream.

In an effort to make this somewhat constructive, one of my favorite non-mainstream coaches to ever deal with was Rob Kilmer, the girls soccer coach at Sherando High School in Virginia. He wasn't amazingly witty or funny, but he was extremely informative. He used the terminology, then he explained what it meant to both me and my readers. More coaches should consider mainstreaming their language to build a better following.