Farewell, Mercer Island — A truly special place | Reporter’s Notebook

Published 12:30 pm Wednesday, April 26, 2017

When Mary Grady hired me to join the Mercer Island Reporter in October of 2013, I saw it as an opportunity of a lifetime.

It’s true. After helping start a school newspaper at Cleveland High School in Seattle, I had taken a detour with my career path and was looking to get back into the journalism game. When the opportunity knocked, I felt so incredibly fortunate to find this job.

To date, working at the Reporter has been the best job I’ve ever had, and I told that to Mary before she left the newspaper in 2015. But as of Friday , my tenure with the Reporter has come to a close, as I’ve taken a job closer to my home in Seattle.

I didn’t always know what I was getting myself into. The Reporter has indeed gone through many changes since its inception in 1949. I found out on the job there were many choices I had to make in my process of reporting and delivering the news. I wanted to give what I had sought when I read my local daily newspaper as youngster in northwest Indiana, anxiously leafing through sports scores and stats every morning.

One of the things I looked forward to most when I began this job was working in the community that housed NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell. I never did encounter Mr. Russell (and if I did, I probably would’ve admired the NBA legend from afar), but that doesn’t mean my tenure with the Reporter was without its unforgettable moments.

One month on the job, I covered the Mercer Island volleyball team as it won the program’s first state championship. Even from the sidelines, I found myself swept up in the nerve-wracking environment that is the annual state volleyball tournament.

In the spring of 2015, I witnessed Mercer Island win state championships in a mind-blowing five different sports: Mercer Island’s girls golf team, its girls and boys tennis teams and the boys lacrosse team all won state trophies. Of course, there was also the Mercer Island baseball team ‘winning it twice’ for the program’s first state championship. After that wild 13-inning contest, I’ll never forget coach Dominic Woody asking me, “Can I curse?” prior to our post-game interview. And I just barely missed covering another landmark title win this past winter, though it was fun watching from afar as the Mercer Island girls basketball team brought home its program’s first title banner.

The highlights were not limited to victorious moments. In fact, the real highlights were the insights I got from the coaches and athletes during our post-game interviews. My dirty little secret was I never played high school sports. Basketball was my sport of choice, but standing at 5-foot-6, I was left waiting for a growth spurt that would never come, so my career ended at freshman tryouts.

In interviewing coaches and players of every sport at MIHS, I soon found out about the life lessons I missed by not participating and picking another sport. I often walked away from my interviews with the student-athletes amazed at the valuable instruction that was being drilled into their minds by their respective coaches. I’m betting those life lessons will undoubtedly pay off later on down the road.

There are a lot of people I’d love to shout out and thank, but the list is simply too long, even in the small community of Mercer Island. I’d simply like to say to every high school coach who gave me their time to speak with me, thank you. (It seems only fitting that the first person I interviewed after joining the Reporter, Brett Ogata, was also my last interview with the paper.)

To every teacher, school administrator, staff member and School Board member, thank you for working with me. To every community member who gave me their time and made themselves available for an interview or to answer our dreaded Question of the Week, thank you.

To every parent and coach who submitted scores, and to every parent photographer who submitted photos for us to publish, thank you. Carrie Bell was a huge help my first year on the job. Erik Krause was a huge help during my last full season covering Mercer Island prep sports, as was Susie Stenberg and Don Howard.

To Willy Paine and John Fisk, thank you for your continued help with sending us amazing photos (I don’t think John Fisk will ever really know how cool I think he is).

(Also, I have to say that the Mercer Island band and orchestra programs are simply incredible. You guys and gals rock.)

There are plenty of aspects I will miss about this job. Above all else are the people I have met, both whom I’ve worked alongside and in the field. A special shout out goes to Katie Metzger for all her hard work, Shaun Scott for adding Mercer Island sports to his coverage areas and our editor Carrie Rodriguez for simply being a superhero.

“Mercer Island is a special place,” Matt Phelps, former Reporter sports editor, once commented to me over email.

I couldn’t agree more. Thank you, Mercer Island. You’ve certainly been a special place to me.

Before I go, I do have one final request: please continue to support local community journalism. Newspapers like ours love serving the community and depend on readers like you. While the times may change, the need for local journalism will always remain.