Football season has arrived.
High school and college teams begin their season this weekend.
I’m looking for a luckier season.
I got escorted from Beeville sidelines for getting on the sidelines to photograph the Blackcats and home team Beeville.
There were several other photographers doing the same thing.
I later learned the ISD there made it a habit to harass photographers and reporters.
At least that’s what a Beeville newspaper editor told me after reading what I wrote about the episode in mid-season.
Bay City Head Coach and AD Robert Jones came up with a sideline pass for me that easily passes muster wherever the Blackcats
play away from home.
I finished the season, or I should say the season finished me when I broke my shoulder at a Blackcat playoff game at Calallen.
As it turns out, I followed up the healing from that with a surgery in June for a new shoulder replacement.
I’m ready for another Bay City season, albeit from a greater margin of distance from the playing field.
It’s hard to beat football game excitement and all Matagorda County teams should be improved.
Communicating with Jones at BCISD, David Lucio at Tidehaven and Van Vleck’s Shannon Permenter, all exude excitement and confidence.
Trust me, the two aren’t always the same. They are with these guys.
Let’s change gears for a while, the staff of the Sentinel has watched the city officials writhe as they were attacked by “investigative reporters.”
A lot of what these so-called journalists have brought to light happened inside City Hall – at meetings Jessica Shepard and I have covered over the years.
In this week’s Sentinel, we are running inches and inches of city hall responses to allegations these “paragons” of journalism have brought forward.
Neither Jessica or I have seen these people at city meetings.
And as far as I’m concerned you have to be present to see the record unfold.
As a 52-year newspaper journalist being front and present to cover meetings and events, this is unacceptable.
OK, here’s the rub for me.
We’re running the city’s replies to the warped news reports, right about the same time we’ve been engaged in a months-long battle of our own with the city over the Texas open meetings law.
City Hall has waged war on us because we protested how they acted.
Difference is, sports fans, we’ve been there reporting the news.
And now we’re running the city’s lengthy rebuttals to these journalistic imposters.
The City didn’t ask us to run the back-and-forth accusations/facts.
We chose to do it because the news is now being bent by people who are trying to set the world on fire with their accusations and unverified information.
We want the public to be informed and have all the facts.