Well the 2010 fall season has begun with a flurry.
The Cowboys reported for fall camp 179 players strong and it has been a busy first two days. Not only do the players get force fed a lot of material early on in meetings, then you mix in practice, pictures, and it becomes a very long day.
Just a little bit about what goes into the beginning of fall practice on my end. I came in early yesterday around 7 and started working on the information sheets the players turn in to me. They actually filled them out in the late team paperwork meeting on Wednesday night. I got to give a hats off to Coach Chris Jones and his assigned GAs because they had the player sheets alphabetized and three-ring bound for me when I showed up.
For the next several hours I typed in all of the newcomers into an excel file I call the working football roster. It is a file that I work off of to keep the huge numbers of players straight. Sometimes reading the hand writing off those sheets can be crazy and it is where the most mistakes of player spellings come in to play.
I then update the returner’s weights, position changes and number changes and merge them into a file to have a working roster. I had everything into a roster by 10:30 and we had pictures scheduled for 11. We ran through all of the players in about an hour. I had them check the roster and make sure their information was correct and then we were done.
All of the pictures have to be cropped and edited so I started in on that until about 2:20 and then headed over to the practice field to help setup the media with interviews at practice. KTXS and KTAB/KRBC did interviews with coach Keeling, Hank Hornsby and Justin Feaster. I also shot some pictures and video for the web site.
I then came back and posted the pictures and a press release about practice to the web site. Then at 5:15 at the end of practice I went back to the practice field, shot some interview footage and lined Abilene Reporter News Beat Writer Daniel Youngblood up with some interviews with Steven Rockwell and Derrick Grant.
After that I went back to the office and started editing the video and put it on to the web. It takes a while to load the video, fortunately I had it timed about right and my wife and daughter brought me some dinner around 7ish. Then crazy me decides to set up my new desk that I received yesterday, which I did and then finally edited some more photos before finally going home about 11.
I was back at it early this morning and finally finished editing and IDing the photos around 12:30. Julie Pride, out student worker did a good job of starting to type the newcomers into the backend system of our web site. I added the photos to the newcomers and did some reworking of the web site bios (which have to be put in manually one at a time) and finally at 4:45 I put up the first public viewing off the roster with pictures (except for a few that have to take retakes).
I also am trying to finish off the football media guide over the weekend and send it to press early next week. It will be a full weekend and then next week its starts over as volleyball and soccer report.
This is the busiest time of the year, but it is also the most challenging and fun for me. I am so excited for our teams this year. Both soccer teams and the football team are all ranked in the national preseason polls and the VB team should also be a contender for the conference crown. Cross country has added some depth and should be more competitive this year as well.
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