Upon Further Review

a certain slaw-jawed sports columnist and blogger is, sometimes he get forgetful and you, the fans (both of you) suffer.

In the two weeks since Fort Defiance decided that Terry Waters’ 231-65 record during his 14 years at the school wasn’t good enough, we still haven’t heard anything.

Nope. Nuttin. Nada. Not a whisper from the administration as to why it happened. Only “no comment[s]” from Athletic Director Jack Tucker and Principal Larry Landes. Oh, that and the promise of a letter sent to Waters in the next few weeks that, according to Landes, will give the outraged parents and wrestlers of the program “confidence” in his decision to release the well-loved coach.

Thanks to modern technology that allows us to zip newspaper pages in electronic form across the mountain for its eventual printing, the night Waynesboro beat Turner Ashby up in Bridgewater we had an early deadline. We got the paper out and went home.

By the time I reached Greenville, I had a voice mail on my cell phone. (Hey, I drive with the music loud which makes it tough to hear a phone that is always on vibrate). It was from Jim Critzer and it wasn’t a nice message.

I’ll spare you the gory details and won’t quote the vinegar-lipped coach verbatim, but it went something along the lines that he couldn’t get a hold of anybody in the office, he let me know how he felt about it and then let me know what he felt about me and, though I don’t quite remember, probably included where I could put my cell phone. End of story.

It wasn’t like I had been here for ages when the fax came into our office that some “really exciting” news was going to be announced for the then-Challenger League. Actually, I had only been here a few months when I found out I would be covering a group of local kids playing baseball on the White House Lawn.

Gee, welcome to the job, right?

If the inaugural season of the Southern Valley DoesStink has taught us anything it’s that, yeah, this district does stink. It’s a sham of a district run by a group of knuckleheads that couldn’t give two licks about the kids that wear the school colors with pride and go out there and try to win for either one of the five schools that call this glorified mental institution home.

What other district can’t figure out how the heck to schedule basketball games? What other district is led by a group of athletic directors and principals that could care less about the athletes they suck dry for the money they can make off them? Sure, a lot of districts want to make money off high school athletics. Heck, the Virginia High School League doesn’t see names or faces, only dollar signs. But nobody, and I mean nobody, in any other district in the state makes it as obvious as this group.