Wild Week

Just thought I'd let you know why I haven't written much this week. One of the busier weeks in recent memory for me.
Sunday- Indoor Flag Football Officiating 7:30 pm to Midnight
Monday-Newslink 8 am to 5:30 pm Class 6 pm to 8 pm
Tuesday-Class 8-9 am Newslink 9am -4:30pm Jr. High Basketball Officiating 6-8 pm Intramural basketball officiating 8:30-midnight
Wednesday-Newslink 8 am-5:45 pm Class/Newswatch 6 pm-9:45 pm
Thursday- Newslink 9 am-5 pm Cardinal Sports Live 7:30-8:30 Intramural Supervising 8:30-10 CRU 10 pm-11 pm.
Friday Newslink 8am-4:30 pm JV basketball Officiating 6-7:30 pm
Saturday Broadcast Ball State game 1 pm-4 pm

Pretty busy week for me but I'm enjoying what I'm doing...I put together a pretty good package on steroids and high school athletes today...it should be available to watch at www.newslinkindiana.com sometime tomorrow.

In other news: Ball state football signed a 3 star quarterback from Texas today who decommitted from Oregon to come here. The kid is really really good. He is actually rated higher than Nate Davis (BSU's current quarterback and future NFL player). Kelly Page is the guy and he's 6'3 200 pounds. I believe he'll be Nate's successor.

Meeting Mr. Basketball

I know some of you have heard bits and pieces of this story so I thought I would write it all out for everybody.
The story begins with my assignment for Newslink a couple of weeks ago. My assignment was a story about a Muncie City Park superintendent who had not been reappointed by the new mayor of Muncie. (The Muncie Mayoral ordeal is another story but in a nutshell...the Democrat won the election by 9 votes. Then during the recount some votes were ruled not to be counted so the Republican won the recount by 12 votes or something like that...there are still legal issues as I'm sure you can imagine but as for now Republican McSherley is the Mayor of Muncie.)
Anyway...Ron Bonham was the superintedent of this park for 38 years so it was a significant story when McSherley chose not to reappoint him to his position. However, there was an unusually loud outcry from the community. So I worked on the story with a buddy of mine and we interviewed the mayor as well as Ron Bonham. Now, I can't say that I truly recognized Bonham's name but I did think that I had read it before and as I came to find out...I had. Bonham was actually Indiana's Mr. Basketball in 1960. He played for the hometown Muncie Central Bearcats and lead the Bearcats to an undefeated season until the state championship where MC lost to (I think) East Chicago. Bonham told me that the state championship game was the only game in his entire career in which he fouled out and he also said the loss could be chalked up to his team being over confident. I can understand why...you see...Muncie Central beat the #2 team in the state in the semifinals game of the tournament by around 40 points. Bonham's success didn't end with high school graduation however. In fact, he was only getting started. Bonham went on to play at Cincinatti (I can never spell it right) and won TWO national championships with those Bearcats. He was then drafted by the Boston Celtics where he played for (I think) 3 seasons and won TWO NBA championships along side Bill Russell and some of the other Celtic greats.
After finding all of this out...what I had originally thought was an unusually loud outcry from the community made perfect sense. You simply don't mess with Mr. Basketball. Especially in a city which calls itself the "Basketball Capital of Indiana" or where the school has won more state championships (8) than any other high school.
I thought all of this was pretty cool and I'm hoping to do a story on Ron Bonham's life a little later on this semester. I'll keep you updated on where this goes.

I HATE Dish-Network

I made a big mistake back in August when I decided that we should get Dish Network for our apartment instead of regular old cable. Today one of my roomates bumped the dish so we lost our signal...I tried to move the dish back where it would work again but didn't have any luck...So I called Dish Network. After being transferred at least 5 times I finally got to the technical department only to talk with a Robot for 5 minutes...I was ready to throw the phone. Finally I did get to talk with a real person and she walked me through about 30-45 minutes worth of instructions before finally conceeding that she needed to send a technician then she informed me it would be a $50 charge for the technician to visit me and the earliest one could get to my apartment was Thursday afternoon. I told her not to worry about it and I would try to fix the stupid thing myself. Luckily...I just moved the dish enough to reconnect it although our local channels are not showing up which means I can't watch Tiger dominating the golf tournament. Either way...I've decided after this I will no longer deal with Dish Network!

School Bus Crash and Sickness

Today I covered an accident involving a semi, 3 other vehicles, and a school bus. It wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds but it was still quite a mess. There weren't any serious injuries so that was good. The accident happened when the semi didn't slow down while the school bus was stopped on the highway picking up a student. The semi slammed into a van which slammed into an SUV which slammed into a car which slammed into the bus....I know, pretty wild! There other thing about shooting the story was that by the time my photog and I got there it was only about 9:15 am so it was still pretty cold....when I say pretty cold I mean it was 1 degree with out considering the wind chill! So that made things a little crazy.
Sickness...Jessie hadn't been feeling well for most of the week and yesterday she finally went to the Ball State health center. She found out that she has strep throat and of course I figured I wouldn't be far behind. So today, after I was done with the bus crash story I went over to the health center myself and although I didn't test positive for strep the doctor said I sounded like strep might be in the works. She also said my throat also looked like I could have it so she gave me a prescription (the same Jessie has) and made a joke about how we could be a cute couple taking our antibiotics together. I'm hoping I can head the strep off and get it out of the way.

Another Crazy Day!

Ok...if you haven't read about my day yesterday then you should skim over it because it will let you know how crazy this day will be on top of that. I've of course got newslink (although we don't start until 9am becasue of a class that I'm not in) so that will last until 4:30 or 5. Basically as soon as newslink is over I'll jump in my car and drive to Cowan High School (about a 20 minute drive) because I'm scheduled to officiate a JV girls game starting at 6. As soon as the game is over it's back to the Tcom building for Cardinal Spors Live which airs live at 8:30. When CSL is over at 9 I'll be heading over to Pruis Hall for CRU which starts at 9:15...when CRU is over at around 11 I'll be heading back to my apartment and going to bed!

Long Day

Today was a really long day. I woke up at 7 am so I could get to the newsroom by 8. At newslink we always have our morning story meetings starting at 8 am. Today I already knew what my assignment was... I worked on a package about the 80th anniversary of the Muncie Fieldhouse. My photographer Steve and I went to the fieldhouse and got a lot of b-role then we conducted a few interviews. One interview was with a custodian in the fieldhouse, another was with a teacher at Muncie Central who is working on a collection of the history of the fieldhouse, and the third interview was with the current head coach of the Bearcats...Matt Fine (he is a really nice guy and a really really good coach...something like .800 + winning percentage in the past 6 seasons). Shooting the package was really relaxed...Steve and I are both sports guys so we were in our element and we even had enough time to play a few games of "p.i.g." in the fieldhouse. By the way...if you would like to check out the kinds of things we do at Newslink Indiana you can check it out at http://www.newslinkindiana.com/ .
After Steve and I were done shooting (footage and hoops) we had enough time to go grab a bite to eat and head back to the newsroom for the editing process. Editing went well until it was time to actually send the finished package to the control room and there were some problems. I would explain them to you but I don't know what they were...anyway... after our computer guru figured out what was wrong it was about 4:30. I got the story in but we had major computer problems in many areas and getting our news briefs taped and on the air was a real challenge.
On Wednesdays I have a class about producing that starts around 6:30 so by the time all the computer issues were worked out it was time for my class to start. This class is in charge of Newswatch...the evening newscast on WIPB in Delaware county for Wednesdays and today was our first show...IT WAS BAD!!! There were a lot of inexperienced people on the broadcast tonight (myself included) and so things were really rough. We did pull the show off and my sports segment went perfectly fine but we certainly have a lot of room to improve. The show finally went on the air at 9 pm and ended at 9:30...after the post show meeting was over it was time for me to head over to the Rec Services building to help out with intramural officials training. I enjoyed the training and helping guys learn what officiating basketball is all about but by the time the training was over at 11:30 pm it had been about a 15 1/2 hour day for me. I made a trip over to Jessie's dorm to check on her because she hasn't been feeling well and I arrived back at my apartment around midnight and started writing this.
If anyone actually reads all this then you'll probably be as tired as I am right now...with that said...I'm going to bed! Goodnight!

Today

Today I worked on a package I'll be putting on Newswatch tomorrow evening. It's a sports package on the 80th anniversary of the Muncie Fieldhouse.

What I'm working on today

I'm working on a story for today's newscast. It's a story on a luncheon for MLK day. I'll be traveling to Anderson for the story.

Getting Started

My aunt Jenny and I had a phone conversation earlier today and she told me she wanted me to start a blog. To tell you the truth, I had never really given the idea much consideration before. In all reality I thought, "Why would anyone care what I think?" However, I'm not going to use my blog for a place to spout off on issues (atleast not very often). Instead, I'm going to use this as a way to keep you informed on what's going on in my life. I'll try to add funny or interesting stories that I have encountered and more things of that nature. So...this is a start. I'll be adding more in the near future.