By By Adam Robinson – Sports Editor
This past Thursday and Saturday I had the chance to go back to Troy as I followed the T.R. Miller Lady Tigers to the South regional in basketball when they took on Ashford and Handley.
I had not been back to Troy since spring graduation last May. Going back up there, I was immediately met with the new changes of the baseball field. My how it has changed. But that is not the reason behind this column.
Working in the athletic media relations office in Troy the two years I was there, this past week was one that we did not look forward to.
At Troy during this week, we hosted the South regional for boys and girls classes 1A-6A.
That meant 24 girls and boys teams.
The tournament usually went from Monday to the championship games on Saturday, AKA early morning to late at night.
We spent many hours in Trojan Arena that week and felt like we lived there. We hosted 48 teams, which was 36 games including championship games and even did our Troy games after the tournament. That is an average of seven games a day this year because they did not play on Monday from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Usually, we got out of class this week with excused absences because of the tourney, but also during this we may have went to a couple of classes that we needed to attend.
If you didn't love basketball before that week, you did before the week was over. There were some good games, some bad games and even a fight between fans my first year that saw them get arrested.
My job usually consisted of stat crew which was me and another person on the computer inputting or calling the stats for the game that we printed and gave to coaches and other media after the games.
The first thing my former boss Ricky asked me when I got there was if I wanted to do stats on the computer!
While I did not realize it at the time, I now know how important all those stats we did and final stats book we ran were to the media. It was nice just looking through the book and finding what I need and type my game stories.
While we did get paid, not enough for the hours we put in, it was great experience. If you did not know stat crew before the week you did at the end.
It was nice going back Thursday and Saturday and watching the game and seeing the tournament go on and knowing that I did not have to work it.