A Sunlight Story?

Yes, I am a young journalist. Yes, I do not choose the greatest story ideas yet. But Brian Sandalow must have really been reaching. He wrote an entire story about the setting sun affecting wide receivers ability to catch the football. That could be a fine story if it was about an instance in a game. But he wrote it about a drill in practice. As Allen Iverson once said, "We talkin' about practice, man." Implying that practice isn't that big a deal. In this situation, I agree with Allen. The story went onto another page talking about some Mizzou players struggling with the sun. I thought that there were bigger issues out there contained in this story. It was Mizzou's first spring practice after ten days off for spring break, something about that would have been better in my mind. The best story was addressed later in this article. In one of the little "blurbs" attached to the end of the story was information about wide receiver Jerrill Humphrey having some academic problems, and that he might not even be on the team next year. This would cause Mizzou to be a little thin, in terms of depth, at the wide receiver position this fall. I felt that was a much bigger issue than wide receivers struggling with the sun for twenty minutes in a spring practice. As a guy who played wide receiver for his entire football career (seven years in all), catching a ball thrown in the sun is hardly a newsworthy event. It can be done, it is not impossible. Each one of the wide receivers on the Mizzou football team has done it before, and each one will do it again. It's quite simple really, when the pigskin crosses into the great blob of light that is the sun, all you have to do is catch that giant sphere that is burning your eyes, the ball is in there somewhere.

Publish Date: April 5 in the Missourian.