march madness & more

along with the country at large, the week has been one consumed by basketball - girls hoops, boys hoops, and lots of driving from one to the next - good way to see small towns in your state that you've never heard of before and likely would never go visit were it not for tournament level prep sports....

we're trying to cover everyone, despite our staffing, which means trying to get to 2 games a night, as was the case tuesday - at least mine were at bookends of our county, which helped - got to stay for the first half of one game, which was in downriver Detroit area, and i really felt like i should stay for the end, because it was a good game, but i figured it'd take about an hour to cut across to Milan, which is on the outskirts of the northwest part of our coverage (with no clear cut from one to the next except for a windy back road)...got there just at game start, and it was a close one, too, but they lost, so, not a lot of good reaction - and for some reason, it seems we've moved away from running sad reaction, so if they wanted that, i should have stayed at the first til the end, but who can predict these things, right?

worked a split the next day, cos i normally would be on shift in the day, but there was a news assn. that night as well as sports, and the hoops was out of town, so there was no way Mr. B. could cover both - not much going on in the day, so i stayed for a while, then took a break and went back in before heading out to cover the final service at this church, which is being forced to close due to building code violations and safety issues...a lot of weird backstory to this one - a guy from the church contacted us to do a story about how they were losing their church, then later said we should contact the head of their board to make sure it's ok for us to cover their final service, and he's in canada, and finally that morning, the reporter reaches him, and he's hesitant, cos they don't want "bad publicity," but the reporter assures him we're not out to slam them, just tell their story, so he gives the okay, and meanwhile, the guy who originally told us about this calls the reporter and says he really doesn't want his name or any quotes to be in the story now (sketchy) - oh, and it's not really gonna be a service, it's a bible study in a basement room, but whatever, this is page one for the next day, so we have to go cover whatever it is that's going on, even if it doesn't look very "churchy" (think i just made that word up)...

so i get there, and a coulpe people are sitting in chairs, and they're either just sitting there or they're looking through last week's sunday ad inserts, and no pastor is there....one guy tells me they're all in a board meeting, and things will start whenever they get done...so i wait, and i wait, and i take a picture of these old signs and gospel record album that they've tacked up on the wall - looks like it should be something in the south

and then a man comes out and approaches me and starts saying how this is such a hard time for them, and they really don't want any bad publicity on top of things, and the small church community is very chatty, and they don't want to fuel the rumor mill, and no one at the church knows who contacted us about this, but it wasn't any church head, and i'm thinking, he's gonna kick me out, but he doesn't come right out and say that, so i tell him again, we got the okay from their head in canada, we're not out to smear them, and frankly, gossip and rumor mills arise from almost every story in a small town, and we're not trying to be a part of that, but it happens, and no one can really control that, so finally he says, i know you have a job to do, we just really want to avoid more hardship...i think he really just wanted me to volunteer to leave, but i wasn't doing that and leaving us with nothing for page one, so i reassured him again and said i was just going to make some pictures when things got going, nothing intrusive and that i would be able to write a caption that expressed their feelings about their current situation...so, he goes back into their meeting, and finally it wraps up and they come out, and the visiting pastor leading the bible study (because their real pastor is in the hospital recovering from an emergency hip replacement surgery after falling a couple days ago - just to make things even rosier for this congregation!) says that he's just going to fill them in on what's going on, will have a short prayer and that'll be it - "this will be brief" - and it was, all over in about 5 minutes....thank god for pentecostals, and their more visual praying, and the woman i focused on just happened to be the wife of the real pastor, who personally built that building with the help of church volunteers 55 years ago, so, it all worked out in the end, but it was a strange one!

the next day, back for more sports - regional girls hoops finals - and they were playing in a town called Quincy, which looked to be about 2 hours away...so the sports reporter and i met up at the paper, and then, off we went - he's a quirky guy (every sports department i've ever worked with has at least one!), but he's fun quirky, so the longish drive didn't really seem so long...in fact we even got there early enough for him to make a stop at dairy queen for a bbq pork sandwich, which he was really happy about!

the game was really close, total nail biter down to the end, which seems to be the running theme of all our tourney sports events this season....they won, and it was just this overwhelming emotion - especially from one of the girls, who just played the whole game and plays so hard and with so much heart, that by the end she just started bawling - the kind of happy that could just as easily look like sadness - all it is is simply raw, extreme emotion spilling out all over- and, as i learned, this was the first time in school history girls hoops have won a regional trophy....so, a pretty big deal, and their boys team was playing for the district finals the following night, and they've never gotten this far either, so all around, this whole school is just amped up on a march madness cloud of adrenalin and school spirit!

and that next night, it's off to that very game - this drive not quite as far, but unfortunately for Jeff, this town has no dairy queen, so, we just head to the gym....

they're playing a team that's also in our county, so i can shoot action of either, and the cheerleaders stay off to the side, so i don't have to compete with that for a good spot, but this is also one of those gyms that has all of about 5 feet from the wall to the basket, so it's tight, and i kind of struggled with finding the right lens and right position to get anything good, and it was a very physical game, with guys flying into the wall behind the basket, so i had to be kind of on my toes not to get slammed into by very tall boys - turns out i avoided them, but i did get run into by a ref, who back-ran into my 70-210, which rammed the whole works right into my eye socket - ouch!

so, another crazy game, the one team had pretty much commanded the whole game (which was a surprise, cos they were the underdog coming into it - this being the boys side of the girls that had won the night prior) - not by a huge margin, but steady - until the final 4 minutes, and then the other team had a good run, and they pulled ahead, and they were ahead by 5 points with a minute to play, so now i'm on the sidelines shooting reaction stuff, and i'm focusing on the other team, kind of going back and forth, but i feel pretty certain they can pull out this huge upset, so i'm at their end, but then the other team scores, and these guys start missing free thrown on fouls, and now they're only ahead by 2 points, and there's about 20 seconds left, and i'm like, crap, which bench do i go by, cos this could go either way, and i'm really torn by the last 2 seconds, because the losing team gets the ball in the hands of this kid who's a really good 3-point shooter, and if he shoots that and makes it, they're gonna go nuts, but if he doesn't, then the complete upset team wins, and they're gonna go crazy, and i got now one second to figure out which way to start running - he does shoot it, and he does make it, and they do go nuts, and thought i wasn't quite in position to get that, i still liked what i got reaction-wise, and then, it was back in the car, after the reporter finished his interviews, and back to edit through all the pix to submit for the next day....and then, stick around to do the desk toning that night for the next morning's edition

could not get to bed after all that - got home about quarter to one, and had a 9 am assn the next morning - boy scout pinewood derby, which we shoot every year, though this is my first time to catch it - cute little kids, cute little cars - the assn. said the big deal this year was that they were going to have a "car show" - that turned out to be the kids putting their cars in a row on a fold-out table, and they could all vote on their favorite - hmm, not terribly visual - but it was alright in all - i liked the expression of concentration this kid had as he lined up his car for one of the races - and the other faces and flags, etc....

after that i went to the Maple Syrup Festival, which i was actually kind of excited to shoot, but the day was rainy and windy and cold, so i was a little worried that my good potential might be taking a bad turn...got there, and unfortunately my suspicions proved correct - they'd had a pretty low turn-out thus far, and even a lot of their volunteer re-enactors didn't show up (lame!), and to make things worse, the trees were completely dried up after producing a medium-sized pan's worth of sap, so there really wasn't barely anything to boil - great - found this family walking though some of the historic old trading post buildings, and i stuck with them, at least getting this image of the kids playing inside one of the covered wagons - which has pretty much nothing to do with maple syrup, but then, there really wasn't much maple syrup going on at Maple Syrup Day this year! and again, i knew this was our page one art, so i gotta get SOMETHING!

soon, the rain was turning to little pellets as the temps dropped and winds kicked up more, and so, finally i called it - time of death of this assignment - and i left, but i really liked these trees and the flooded inland surrounding them, so that's my scenic contribution for the week!