TGIFF

Sports

October 30, 2009

By JAYSON KNIGHT The McAlester News-Capital Fri Oct 30, 2009, 10:31 AM CDT

Thank goodness it’s football Friday.

With so many sports coming and going throughout the year, it’s a relatively difficult process to go from covering softball, volleyball and football to covering just football.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing I crave more than the vicious collisions, the high-flying action and the coaches gifted with ingenuity.

Sports is an exciting field especially in McAlester. The Lady Buffaloes’ volleyball team and softball team are as good as any in the state. Also the Buffs football team is ranked seventh in the state behind tonight’s contestant, Tulsa East Central who is No. 6, according to okrankings.com. The Buffs have an undefeated streak this season and an offensive onslaught that is poised to show that it’s second to none.

To ready your teams and provide for their needs so well is a major feat and glorious accomplishment for any athletic director or coach.

It’s a personal battle I have with myself to make sure the excellent first base play of Shay Griffin and the tempo-controlling sets of Ginny Judge get the exposure that they have coming to them as well as all the players that assist them in making games fun to watch.

However, eventually, the state tournaments come and then after the athletes celebrate their completion of a hard-fought season, they go. But with no more softball and volleyball, local writers like myself are left with nothing but time to sulk over missed opportunities, much like a young ball-player.

Now, a vibrant, lover of my craft has to find ways to fill the spots you read with the things that you all (or hopefully, at least most of you) find interesting. With no shortage of showboaters and cry-babies on the professional level and even internationally, it’s easy to fill the sports page with negativity and juicy gossip.

I prefer to fill it with the genuinely good-natured, hard working, homegrown athletes that McAlester churns out on a regular basis though. I’m sure most of you have the same type of feeling when you see a player sit on the bench in an important situation in any sport because he or she isn’t making the right number of millions of dollars.

In my opinion, the most efficient pitcher in the state is a sophomore at McAlester High School, Taylor Dewbery. The most ferocious, put-em-on-their-heels attack tandem in high school volleyball is Lauryn Kirkhart and Kati Wills from McAlester. Josh Copeland from Haileyville is a bruising linebacker that controls the opponent’s emotions with the hits he puts on unfortunate ball-carriers. It seems like all you have to do is just add water and Mario Hardin becomes an instant touchdown for Hartshorne. Tyler Crabtree is as dangerous a quarterback as he is a wide receiver and that was seemingly impossible. I simply do not have room to mention all the upper-echelon players and programs all throughout our area that, to me, deserve to be in headlines much more often than a mistake that Dez Bryant made or a steroid scandal.

That’s why nothing makes me happier this time of year than the plays, the players, the coaches, the banners, the cold, muddy struggle for position with plays named after and viewed as weaponry, and we better not forget those lights.

Everything a lover of sports needs to enter football nirvana is still thriving, pulsing, and engulfing those who go to the games. You go to the games even when it’s cold, you love it and sometimes it loves you right back.

That’s what loving football is all about though. I want those games where everything is intense with pain and triumph. I want to see diving receivers, quarterbacks dissecting defenses with precision passes, running backs that have a split-second to decide whether to avoid contact or inflict contact.

I want to see defenders that can end your will and use the cold to their advantage to make every collision count.

Give me that and a beautiful wife that doesn’t need either to speak with me or anything else during football season, and I am in perfect serenity.

Contact Jayson Knight at jknight@mcalesternews.com

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