A funny thing happened to me in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, after weeks and weeks of working from home and limited human interaction.
I found hope.
Hope for myself. Hope for the future. Hope for us all.
And it was all thanks to a bunch of teenagers.
When the Arizona Interscholastic Association announced the premature end the spring sports season on March 20, it was a decision that people who play, work in and cover local sports knew was coming. But that didn’t make it easier for anyone involved.
I immediately pitched the idea to my sports editor, Ryan Finley, to produce a project showcasing the best Southern Arizona high school athlete for each of the spring sports — a way to honor those who missed out on their season.
But the logistics were tough. How would we decide who was the best at their sport, and who were we to make that decision? We then expanded the project to showcase one athlete per school, and asked administrators to make the tough decisions.
That meant reaching out to more than 30 schools, some of whom were unable to pick just one athlete, completing dozens of interviews in just a few weeks and writing multiple stories each day.
Leo Villa, left, and twin brother Ivan, pose for a photo, April 16, 2020, Sahuarita, Ariz., were seniors on the Walden Grove baseball team. Leo was a catcher and Ivan pitched in the COVID19 shortened season.
It was a tremendous amount of work, and 40-plus interviews and 34 articles later, the “Spring Stars” project has come to a close.
It’s bittersweet. These young athletes were amazing and they restored me to a hopeful state of mind during what’s arguably the most precarious time I’ve lived through.
Despite all they missed — for seniors, that means their final high school season, prom, graduation and Senior Night — each of these students remained positive.
They didn’t want to spend a long time talking about what they lost, but rather what they’re doing now and next.
The athletes were humble and grateful, and they reminded me of simpler times. As the series progressed, the outpouring of thanks I received from athletes, parents, coaches, principals and community members fed my soul in a way I’ve never experienced. I woke up each morning eager to work on this project. The athletes kept my spirits bright in a way nothing else could have.
Sabino senior shortstop Sydney Gray, posing for a photo, May 13, 2020, Tucson, Ariz.
These young people are our future, and given the goals and dreams they shared with me and their forward-thinking attitudes, I feel like we’re in good hands.
And we could probably all learn a thing or two from them about how to handle uncertainty, loss and disappointment (I know I did.)
Four days before the launch of “Spring Stars, I emailed executive editor Jill Jorden Spitz the following: “If someone had asked me two years ago if I wanted to write 30+ feature stories about high school athletes, I would have laughed them out of the room.”
And I meant it.
Two years ago, I had just won my second Arizona Press Club Sledgehammer Award for pursuit of the truth, this time for my relentless efforts to expose the state of Title IX within the University of Arizona athletic department.
Before that, I worked hard for more than a year on a handful of stories about the Pima County Sheriff Department’s misuse of federal funds, a series that resulted in the indictment of one of the department’s top officials on federal charges.
Ryan Zuniga poses for a portrait at Rio Rico High School, on May 8, 2020.
And before that, I got my chops on a yearlong investigation into several members of the Tucson Police Department’s involvement with a long-running string of local brothels and the fallout as a result. (My quest to expose the truth in what we called the Tucson Prostitution Probe earned me my first sledgehammer.)
So spending a month-plus writing daily feature stories about kid athletes? That wasn’t really on my agenda back in 2018 or even 2019.
But 2020 is a whole different ball game, so I also meant what I wrote next in that email, and I typed those words after completing only a handful of interviews with these hopeful, young stars.
“Which would have been a huge mistake, because this project has been a lot of fun and great for my soul during these weird times.”
I guess it just figures that it would take a bunch of kids to teach a cynic like me to appreciate that each story we tell as journalists is important in its own way.
