Jerry Maguire said it all

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/05/2017 (3048 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a classic scene in the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire” where the title character, a sports agent played by Tom Cruise, begs football receiver Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. to help Tidwell help him negotiate a contract.

Today, I’m asking the same of the various sporting groups in our community. Help us help you.

The thing we pride ourselves most on in the Brandon Sun sports department is covering Brandon and Westman events to the best of our ability. Without a doubt, there are certain teams and organizations that we will dedicate more time and effort to, such as the Brandon Wheat Kings, Brandon University Bobcats and curling provincials. We love high school sports here as well but also want to give coverage to any sport, be it at the minor, junior or senior levels. Sometimes it may be a feature, sometimes it’s just a photo, but we would like to be there.

There are a few challenges with trying to get as much local content as possible into the paper. During the winter, Perry Bergson, Nathan Liewicki and myself often feel run off our feet and find ourselves putting in extra time and effort to make sure we get high school, MJHL and midget AAA hockey results and stories in print as well as anything else that is reported to us.

The summer is a bit slower in our office, but it doesn’t always feel that way with people taking time off for vacation, leaving our staff level of three cut by one-third.

Because we feel swamped in the winter and short-staffed at times during the summer, we may tend to focus on a few teams more and miss others, and this is where Jerry Maguire’s famous phrase comes in. We can only give your organization coverage if we know about it and you help us.

If you’re part of a sports organization — be it bowling, tennis, marathon, cricket, lacrosse, water skiing, sailing, motocross or anything — and would like a bit of exposure, please contact us. If there’s an event that’s coming up that you would like to see us at, let us know about it. I can’t guarantee we can get to every event, but we definitely can’t be there if we don’t know about it.

Please don’t be shy about sending in results from league games or tournaments as well. All we ask is you do it in a timely manner. The Brandon Sun is a daily newspaper and as such we try to get everything that happened from one day in the following day’s edition, not a few days later.

We ask you get the results and details to us by 9 p.m. from Saturday to Thursday, and 10 p.m. on Fridays. We set these deadlines because we need time to take the information you give us, write up the story, put it on a page, proofread the page and then ship it to our printer.

This is also why knowing about events in advance helps because we can allot space on pages for results that we’re expecting. If we get surprised, it’s sometimes a stressful juggling act for us.

We will always do our best to get your results in, but the odds will be improved greatly if you get them to us by our deadline and we’re not surprised at the end of the night.

So please help us out. Let us know if you’re a sport looking to get some coverage or if you want to see results in the paper. It’s really easy, just shoot us an email (sports@brandonsun.com) or call the office (204-571-7442).

Send us your schedule as well so we know when you play and please get results in by our deadline. Ones that come in late will sometimes be relegated to the scoreboard page the following day pending how late it is.

By doing these simple things, your organization will get more publicity, possibly helping it grow in the process, and the Sun’s sports section will be better for it as well. It’s a win-win situation.

So please, help us help you.

SHOUTOUT: Quick congratulations to Novell Thomas and the Junior Bobcats girls’ club basketball program. The 15-and-under team were B provincial champions after defeating Swan River 21-19 in Winnipeg on Sunday, while the 14U Black team lost their B final 59-25 to Thompson Black.

It’s good to see club basketball starting to develop in the community, and that will only help Thomas and Westman improve the quality of hoops players in the community as well as Thomas on the recruiting trail for his Bobcats women’s basketball program.

HELPING HAND: It’s funny how we hear about stories happening somewhere else and eventually find a local connection. That happened for me with the flooding in Montreal.

Westman has dealt with its fair share of flooding for the last few years, but Montreal was just hit really hard this month. The local tie to that story is former, and possibly future, Bobcat men’s basketball player Mikee Dosado. The point guard from Montreal spent two season with the team from 2013-15 and is planning to return to it in the fall.

Dosado’s family home was ravaged by the flood. They were ordered to evacuate it on May 7 and are living in a hotel, with the room and food covered by the Red Cross.

The damage to their house is extensive and they have to rebuild their basement from scratch. If the mould reaches the main level then they’ll have to demolish the whole house and rebuild from scratch.

Insurance won’t cover any of the costs and the government will only cover part of the rebuild.

Dosado’s return to the Bobcats isn’t official yet as he still has to be accepted into his program at BU and the athletic department has to make sure he’s academically eligible to play. However, he said via Facebook on Monday that he made a commitment to Bobcats head coach Gil Cheung and is “coming back no matter the situation.”

Dosado, who left the team for family reasons two seasons ago, was a class act when he was here and that does not appear to have changed. It’s hard to see his family hit with this tragedy and his resolve and commitment to family and the Bobcats is admirable.

If anyone would like to support him and his family, please make a donation at gofundme.com/relief-for-dosado-familly.