Take a deep breath, sports fans, the kids are back in school and the fall season is fast approaching.
This is, after all, Indiana - a place where high-school athletics holds a certain heightened significance.
There are lots of passionate opinions with regard to local sports, and they bubble up from time to time.
It's really quite an interesting phenomenon. Frankly, it never ceases to amaze me.
Taxes could be raised to the breaking point. School achievement could be in the bottom 10 percent. Roads and bridges could be crumbling. No one writes a letter to the editor.
But sports?
If you're a coach and you cut a kid from a team, or you don't win as many games as the fans think you ought to, you better watch out.
Parents and fans will be gunnin' for ya. They'll write letters to the editor. They'll show up at school board meetings. They'll carry petitions. They'll meet with athletic directors. They'll call school board members.
I've seen it dozens of times in my newspaper career, and I'll see it dozens more. It's just the way it is in Indiana.
People take their sports seriously.
There is probably only one vocation that encounters more "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations than an Indiana high school coach - the unfortunate sap who has to sort it all out as editor of the local newspaper.
Ah, but I do I love the smell of ink and newsprint in the fall sports season. It has that slightly singed aroma. I think when they - whoever they are - coined the phrase "hot off the press," they were referring to the letters pages of small town Indiana dailies in the autumn.
The leaves are transformed into vivid hues, the air becomes crisp and cool, birds migrate and the letters page burns.
I remember one time back when Barry Lewis was the sports editor.
He suggested that, perhaps, Warsaw fans weren't the greatest sports fans because they were chanting derogatory things about opposing fans during games.
He noted that Warsaw fans were getting a reputation around the conference as kind of snotty.
We got so many letters we had to add pages. It was incredible. It got so crazy, I promoted it on the front page.
I put Barry's picture in a box with a target on his forehead. I ran the teaser, "Letter writers target Lewis. See page 5A."
Then there was the time back in the late '80s and early '90s when a girls team went 22-0 until losing in a regional game. The very next year they were 21-0 and lost in the regional again.
Both times they lost to a team they had handily defeated in the regular season.
Oh my word.
I think that poor coach would have endured less fan angst if he had been arrested for some heinous crime.
We got letter after letter demanding his job - or his head - on a platter, depending on how you interpreted the level of criticism.
More recently, a group of fans were highly critical of the basketball coach. There were private meetings and public meetings and votes and policy statements.
It should be interesting to see how the basketball season plays out this year.
So it comes as no surprise to me this fall season that we have letters from some concerned sports parents with regard to how their kids were treated.
And it should come as no surprise to readers that we published the letters in the newspaper.
You see, I am a fanatical devotee to the notion of a free press. I think most people probably share my devotion in that regard.
But it dawned on me early in my newspaper career that freedom of the press is afforded only to those fortunate enough to control a press.
That's why I also am a fanatical devotee of a free-wheelin' letters page.
It's the newspaper's way of sharing a little bit of our press freedom with our readers.
Do I agree with everything that appears on our letters page? Of course not.
Do I think that everything that appears on our letters page is 100 percent accurate? No way.
Would I write a letter to the editor over some of these issues if I didn't work here? Probably not.
But I do believe in the importance of an open forum for readers' opinions, regardless of how whacky those opinions may be. And when it comes to high school athletics, there are plenty of opinions out there.
Of course there are limits. There are things that are in bad taste or libelous. (You should see some of the letters that we don't publish.)
I think most readers are smart enough to figure out what's going on with a letter. They can determine to a pretty high level of accuracy whether the opinion or criticism is valid.
And lots of times, one letter will spawn another and still other letter writers will respond. When that happens, taken as a whole, readers can get a pretty good sense of what the truth of the matter is.
Letters also give a sense of what's important to readers. Letters paint a picture of the community, if you will.
Indiana is a pretty sports-crazy state. People in Indiana have strong opinions about their kids and coaches.
I don't see those attitudes changing anytime soon, and I don't envision shielding our letters page from the controversy it generates.
