So, please be patient with photographer Trent Campbell and me.
We are doing our best to show up at your team’s games this fall, really. But it’s been difficult.
To start with, many local high school sports teams have opened on the road. For example, two teams we haven’t seen yet, Mount Abraham and Middlebury field hockey, played four of their first five and five of their first six games, respectively, away from their home turf.
Those other two games? Wednesdays.
And Wednesdays pose another problem for us.
Wednesday games happen after the deadline for our Thursday paper. And they happen three days before the deadline for our Monday paper. Events on a Wednesday aren’t just yesterday’s news, they’re ancient history.
And schedules this season are not only overloaded with Wednesday games (always a problem in hockey season, but that’s another story), but those games also include an unusual number that pit local teams against one another.
We rely on those rivalry games — among MUHS, Mount Abe, Vergennes and Otter Valley teams — to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone.
This fall, Wednesdays offer games between the OV and VUHS boys’ soccer teams, the only meeting of MUHS and Mount Abe field hockey, VUHS boys’ soccer games against both Mount Abe and MUHS, and a clash between the Commodore and Eagle girls’ soccer teams.
Remarks uttered at this desk upon first seeing those schedules probably are not fit to be printed here.
Still, by the end of next week we will have added at least four teams to the list of teams the Independent has covered in person that, as of this writing on Tuesday, we have not seen due to the scheduling quirks — both Commodore soccer teams, and Eagle and Tiger field hockey.
To do so, we’ll cover two games this weekend, neither of which will be Tiger football — our apologies to the guys in black in advance. We’ll see you at the Essex game on Oct. 2. Two staff-covered games is the max we can shoehorn into the Monday paper.
Our goal will remain to do our best to see all the Commodore, Eagle and Tiger teams at least twice, and to try to drop in on the Otter squads at least once.
This fall, however, we’re not making any hard and fast promises other than we’ll try to be fair.
In the meantime, we will continue to root for all the athletes. We would love to have the problem of deciding which home playoff games to cover.