This weekend starts the 16th anniversary of Press Pros, along with some hard truths about doing anything you love for that long. Change is inevitable, like it or not.
When I was ten years old, living down in Lawrence County, outside of Ironton, I used to work for a man named Carl Hays in the summertime – picking raspberries, hoeing weeds out of the sweet corn, and staking and suckering his tomato plants.
Mr. Hays was a truck farmer, had a small stand at his house on state route 378, outside Getaway. And on particularly good years he’d cross the Ohio River to sell his excess goods at the produce market in Huntington, West Virginia, on the river bank where the modern-day Civic Center now sits.
Mr. Hays paid me 10 cents a quart back then to pick berries, and 25 cents an hour to hoe and pull hog weeds out of the corn. Rode my bicycle five miles each way to work, and on a good week I sometimes made $5.00. In 1963, I thought I was getting something done. Imagine, pulling a $5 bill out of my pocket to show my dad at the end of the week…when he was making less than a hundred. It was big stuff.
Sometime after working for Mr. Hays…at the OHSAA boys basketball tournament, in 2011.
But it came with a price. Mr. Hays was an elementary school principal, I think, and he was very strict about his work standards. And knowing that, I did my best not to overlook a ripe berry left unpicked, or a weed that might escape my gaze. I tried my best not to make a mistake. As far as I knew, I was the only kid in the neighborhood who made $5 a week, and maybe $50 for the summer.
I became so intent on not missing anything that Mr. Hays said to me one day, “Young man, you’re missing the forest for looking too hard at one tree.” It was the first time I’d ever heard that saying, and of course I had no idea about what he meant. He had to explain it.
“Sometimes it’s good to look up and look around, see the bigger picture, and what you might have missed by looking so intently at just one thing,” he said.
Can’t see the forest for the trees!
And those words have never left my mind, although my own dad was good about saying, “If you don’t take care of the trees you’ll never have a forest. Do the little things well. The the rest will take care of itself.”
And for the first 15 years of Press Pros I think we worked pretty hard to take care of the trees, or the best local stories, while the rest of the forest has slowly encroached on our way of doing things. That said, you’ll see us lifting our heads and looking around a bit more in this, our sixteenth year, with the addition of a couple of new faces, the attraction of new sponsors, and the prospect, suddenly, of how we carry on in the future.
The numbers pretty well prove that we’ve organically become the largest, independent sports site in the state, combining about 60% high school content with 40% Ohio State, University of Dayton, Ohio Harness Horseman Association coverage, and general commentary. And this might surprise you.
We’ve been asked daily since the start of June why we have harness racing coverage as part of our daily beat. The answer is this…we’ve yet to publish a story on racing, drivers, trainers, and owners that hasn’t attracted at least 100,000 readers. And who knew that so many people enjoyed the culture of horses, racing, and Ohio agriculture that horse racing has represented all the way back to its early beginnings.
You’ve no doubt noticed the recent stories on athletes, schools, and conferences from northeast Ohio, as well. And that’s because we looked up last year to notice that there was as much readership for the MAC page outside the area as there was locally…because people in Cuyahoga, Trumbull and Lake counties want to know what’s going on down here, and who Kirtland and Warren JFK might play come Canton and the OHSAA football finals. This spring they were reading about Coldwater baseball up in the Wayne County, where you find Waynedale High School. And who knew?
The internet, despite its flaws, is remarkable.
This weekend’s PBA tournament in Coldwater will attract at least 100,000 readers from around Ohio who just like bowling, and the uniqueness of having a PBA tournament in communities as small as Coldwater and Minster. Indeed, lift up your head and look around. You never know what you might see, or what others have missed in the past.
Publisher Sonny Fulks writes OHSAA sports and Ohio State baseball for Press Pros Magazine.com.
You can’t be everything, of course, and there’s little chance we’re going to be there for the golf and tennis matches.
And it’ll be a while before we show up for marching band competitions, although people tell us we’re missing one great story after another by not doing it. But harness racing gets shared all over the country, because racing has that kind of universal appeal. Tuba players, unless it’s Dick Van Dyke, have always been that one tree in the forest.
We welcome some new faces like Marcus Hartman, who did reach out to us several years ago when Press Pros was still tending the tomatoes one bug at a time.
And I hope you’ll enjoy the photographic addition of Angie Greenwood, from Marysville.
And I hope you continue to appreciate that we’re still dedicated to bringing you the best stories from the best games possible; and sometimes two from the same conference on the same night. That’s another thing we saw when we looked up to look around.
Mr Hays would occasionally smile. If he knew I think he would smile.
He would, however, want no part of the internet!
Precision Strip, in Minster, is a proud sponsor of the best area sports stories on Press Pros.