There's no place like a SIDELINE VIEW!

The thought about reviving the idea of adding a local sports column to the Cheney Free Press came up at a recent staff meeting.

And like the calls over the past several years since my “retirement” in 2019 to come back to help at the Free Press, I said let’s give it a go.

Another topic covered was how we planned to staff upcoming fall sporting events — particularly football — and how there’s no view better than from the action standpoint one the sidelines.

Those parts came together in the column name: SIDELINE VIEW.

At community newspapers like this everywhere, we reporters are the proverbial jack-of-all-trades providing both words and images for our stories.

While those who occupy fancy private boxes at come events, or seats with other special amenities may beg to differ, being on the sideline, start or finish line or baseline is personally just the best place to be at a sporting event.

From the working press standpoint, it beats a “desk job” up in the press box any day.

With the sideline view your head must be on a swivel. The ways to get injured are too numerous to count. Somewhere I have a photo of an errant pass in a basketball game with the ball looming large in the lens and headed right at the bridge of my nose; neither my glasses nor nose were broken!

But being ultra-aware with a SIDELINE VIEW allows you to sometimes actually be in the right place at the right time to capture an image that’s worth those thousand words.

While weaving words together to tell a story is what I as trained to do over 50 years ago when starting college, it’s “making a picture” as my good friend Bart, a retired photojournalist, says is at the foundation of a photo.

My view wasn’t always ON the sidelines but goes back a long time to being a sports fan. Thanks to my mother, a true sports nut herself, for dragging me along to this game or that event.

Somehow while the name of a person I just met gets lost within moments, I still have vague memories of football in the late 50s — Okanogan playing at Omak on Veterans Day.

Or Spokane City League football being played before huge crowds at Joe Albi Stadium in the 60s.

My most memorable work on the sidelines came in my initial stint with the Cheney Free Press starting in 2007. That’s where my camera and I covered Eastern Washington University football until 2018. Between those dozen years came six Big Sky Conference titles — either outright or shared — and that 2010 national championship.

Not only did that time produce a lifetime of memories for an EWU alum, but it served as the foundation of a book I wrote called “TAKING FLIGHT,” about EWU’s unlikely journey to national prominence in college football.

And here I am again, tugged by some gravitational pull that keeps me coming back to write about and photograph high school and college athletics.

The previous several times the phone rang, or the email asked if I was too busy in (semi)retirement to lend a hand at the CFP, I called it being summoned from the bullpen for relief work.

That initial role has since earned me a spot in the starting rotation — part-time of course — for a second consecutive sports season.

Because it remains an honor to still tell stories in the unique environment of community journalism.

Paul Delaney is a “semi-retired” Free Press Publishing sports reporter. He can be reached at [email protected].