One 'Giant' headache

DEERFIELD, Ill.-- The picture you see above was the best I could get all night from the press box. It didn't help that I probably wasn't at the right angle, didn't have flash on, and could not figure out how to use my sister's digital SLR so that resulted in a really bad picture.

I forgot how much these games actually matter to our town, so I was stupid and left my house a half hour early in hopes that I might get to the school a little early and have some time to talk to people before going to work. Instead, I spent 20 minutes battling traffic and circling the school to get a parking spot.

About three minutes after the game started, I managed to find one that was pretty close to the stadium. I saw the massive line for tickets and remembering that I still have my high school ID, I flashed it to security before they asked me to hand it to them. They ended up confiscating it and telling me to get in line for a ticket. I budged the entire line anyway and paid. Luckily nobody stopped me for bringing in a backpack. 

I went up to the press box and was welcomed as one of the only people not working for the school (one writer from my local paper, the Deerfield Review, was there). I found myself as the unusal minority of people not cheering in the press box (even Media Relations people at UMass aren't allowed to cheer). I introduced myself, sat down, opened my computer and of course had no wi-fi. 

I asked one of the guys if they knew where I could pick up a stat sheet at halftime and they looked at me like I was from some foreign country. Twitter was probably the only multimedia aspect that went right last night. You can see my live blogging here.

After the game ended, I went down to talk to the coach. The only problem was that he wasn't ready to talk to me. He asked if I would wait awhile and I said yes. In the meantime, I talked to the dean who is also the baseball coach. He gave me back my ID and then gave me a hard time about being a hot shot trying to get into the game, which I responded by saying, "I'm a college student and I'm poor. Give me a break."

I never ended up talking to the coach after 45 minutes of waiting. Apparently he's never done a post-game interview before because the Review talks to him on Monday since it's a weekly. Then I ran into a bunch of girls from my high school who I've never met before that asked me if I worked for the Deerfield Review and if I could interview them. I responded by saying, "it's curfew, shouldn't you be going home now?" and drove home.

The game itself was pretty good because of how close it was, but I was annoyed the entire time. You can see my wrap in the post below.