When I was hired — almost right out of high school — to join the sports department at the Chattanooga News-Free Press in the spring of 1990, you could’ve filled an entire daily section with all the things I didn’t know about the newspaper business.
One of the early lessons was that most everyone else on staff had a specific area where they focused their work. Veteran reporters handled the University of Tennessee, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and other college beats, while most of the younger guys kept year-round tabs on 70 or so area high schools across two states.
The massive prep staff — we had around 25 sports writers at that time, and most handled a portion of the “prep beat” — typically covered a territory that coincided with either their background or proximity to where they lived. Private school graduates migrated toward covering those schools, while guys who lived near Bradley County or Northwest Georgia blanketed schools in those areas, and so on.
And then there was me. Pimple-faced, naive and unsure of my place among a collection of professionals I had grown up reading every day. Basically a country bumpkin fresh off the turnip truck.
But for all my lack of institutional knowledge for so many other Chattanooga-area communities, the one portion of our readership where I did understand the traditions and storylines also happened to be the area few others had interest in covering.