Commentary: High school football and newspapers go hand in hand

We rolled into the Rankin field house a little late Tuesday, delayed by a lengthy stop at McCamey’s Badger Stadium to visit its football team.

Yet there the Red Devils were, probably starving from a grueling morning practice session. Waiting so some guys from a newspaper 65 miles away could take their mug shots and a team photo.

Head coach Danny Davis kept them there, and after I found him in his office discussing plays with his assistants, he gave me — a reporter whom he never met and only spoke to on the phone throughout last season — control for a second.

“Hey, guys,” Davis told the team in that booming coach voice, with the same volume — an 11 on a 10-notch dial — for coaches from the six-man level, like Rankin, to Class 5A. “This is Willie, and he’s in charge!”

All I needed was the team to line up in the parking lot so we could get photos, but what I received was the same thing we’ve been getting on our two days on the annual Odessa American football tour of the 18 Permian Basin teams in our coverage area.

Respect. For myself, my colleagues, and the newspaper.

Deep down, I believe the relationship between newspaper sports sections and high school teams is a special kind of bond.

We publicly display their performances, the good and bad ones, in a way that players and parents and community members can hold in their hands or see on their computer screens.

We are the record for their achievements, the proof that this game-winning touchdown really did happen on that day, and for that day, it was just as important as the stories next to it, more important than the stories below it.

They, athletes and coaches and fans, give us events to report, to observe and analyze and write about.

They, athletes and coaches and fans, are often our neighbors, people we genuinely hope the best for, in sports, in the classroom, in life.

And when a coach can hold his team for 10 more minutes or stop practice or just talk about his team to a reporter during a long interview, it is a continuation of teams’ respect for newspapers’ work and journalists’ recognition of teams’ work as, not just newsworthy, but impressive and important.

So as newspapers all over the country continue to struggle, either going exclusively online or folding altogether, I think about what a loss this kind of relationship would be.

Yes, maybe like more and more professional and college teams, high school athletics programs could self-promote their teams on Web sites and toot their own horn.

That is fine. But I believe it is saying something when it is someone’s job to report on your games and players and the stories among them — when a company is willing to pay people to do that work.

It is saying something when someone writes a story about people who appreciate those who tell it.