By By Matthew Nascone
This year's Horizons section of our newspaper, which is the huge special section that has many feature stories about the people in the Atmore area, had one section that was extremely interesting and fun for me to work on.
That was the Sports: Behind the Scenes section. If you get a chance check it out. It should be in there with all the other Horizons sections. For that section I got to focus on what I do everyday, sports.
It is always good when I can focus my energy during Horizons on what I am good at. That happened last year with the recreation section of Horizons, but this year it was completely right up my alley.
I was able to interview all the head coaches around the area to pick their brains about what they would do if they did not have assistant coaches. The general consensus was that they would not be able to do their job at all.
Most people would know this, but it was interesting to delve into just how important those assistants are to a head coach.
In this section, we literally tried to unveil what it takes to make a sporting event happen. Because there is no way to have it run smoothly if you don't have all the people responsible for certain jobs doing what they are supposed to.
With this section, we wanted to expose those people and let the public know just who they are and how hard they work.
In addition to the assistant coaches, we chose to acknowledge the volunteers who devote their time in the press box, behind the concession stand and on the chain gang. We also recognized the cheerleaders and the people in the zebra getups, the officials.
All of these interviews were fascinating and I learned a lot about the people who do these various jobs. It was all quite interesting and I am happy they allowed me to talk to them. Because after all, this was the section of the newspaper where we were attempting to give credit were undue credit was due.
I feel like we accomplished this task and I just hope all the people who I interviewed enjoy the final product. It was definitely a time-consuming project, with 20-plus interviews conducted for that one section. That took a lot of time to coordinate, but somehow I did it and stayed sane as well.
And the rest of Horizons might not be of much interest to a lot of you sports fans, but you never know, you could like it. You should give it a try because there is some interesting stuff. I know I was definitely interested in the information I pulled out of the people I interviewed.
There is anything from the tractors that drive themselves to what is new at the YMCA. This year's Horizons is something that I know I am proud of. And I am sure my co-workers would say the same thing because there was a lot of hard work put into it.
Our part of it is done, now we just hope you, the public, read it and like it.
Happy Horizons everybody.
Matthew Nascone is the sports editor of the Atmore Advance. He can be reached at 368-2123 or online at sports@atmoreadvance.com.