BY DANI TIETZ
dani@mahometnews.com
The more I do this, provide a platform for stories that may otherwise not be told, the more I understand the power of keeping a record of events. Part of being a journalist is to catalog happenings so that we can know about recent history and decades from now know about how things came to be.
The story that many news organizations will tell coming out of this weekend at the IHSA volleyball tournament will be about the winners and the losers, the heartbreak and the triumph of missing out or playing for the state championship. Honestly, we will tell those stories, too, because they are important stories to tell.
I think that the best part about being a journalist, though, is that you get to watch events for a long period of time. My counterparts are much better than me in remembering names and dates and scores and statistics. I spend the majority of my time daydreaming, so it is hard for me to recall such things.
But there are instances that leave an impression on my heart, and those are the ones that I can recall very quickly.
When we began the SJO Daily, I didn’t know much about the communities that we were preparing to cover. I was aware that they’d had some successes in sports over the years, but other than that, I was just excited to learn about new people and how they live their common life together.
One of the first games I went to the St. Joseph-Ogden High School volleyball team was playing Mahomet-Seymour High School. It seemed like a no-brainer to attend the game since we were covering both teams in different publications.
I don’t know if it was a special occasion, but after the game, the girls went over to the bleachers where their classmates were standing and they sang the school song together. The fact that their classmates were at a volleyball game in the middle of the day on a Saturday struck me, but watching the students come together like that at the very least caught my attention.
Then they migrated down the bleachers a bit to sing “Happy Birthday” to someone in the stands.
Immediately, I thought, ‘I hope every program at this school is like this.’ Who cares about the score at the end of the game, this is what community is about.
Fast forward almost one year later and St. Joseph-Ogden is playing at Mahomet-Seymour in the championship game of the Bulldog Invitational. Please forgive me here because recalling names and scores is not my thing, but I believe it was the second game and that SJ-O was winning.
An SJ-O player got hurt. As she came out of the game, she sat on the end of the bench. A time-out was called. The players circled up near the middle of the bench, as they normally would, but all of a sudden the circle, girls with interlocked pinkies, moved down to their teammate and they held their time-out with her by their side.
I texted my friend who was sitting on the other side of the bleachers: “This is what it’s all about. THIS!”
As we chronicle the wins and losses, the excitement and nail-biting as athletes navigate the ups-and-downs of playing sports, we tend to forget these little moments that are actually the real goodness that is happening in this world.
On Friday, we watched a St. Joseph-Ogden team play their hearts out. Sure, they had their sights set on a state championship trophy. But what we witnessed on Friday and maybe what we’ve seen from this Spartan volleyball team is that they are a team playing with and for each other.
You can see it in their eyes as they cheer with fire for a point gained or when they are tear-filled from disappointment. It’s beautiful. And one of the most important things that they will do their entire lives.
The thing we often forget when we are just paying attention to scores are those little moments. They never get recognition. They are actually hard to write about. But they make up the essence of belonging, togetherness and community.
They, too, deserve to be written down and remembered in years to come.
