Hullaballou: Farewell and thank you for an amazing adventure

We’re rapidly approaching the end of May which means graduation season is upon us.

A few years ago, in one of only a handful of columns I’ve ever penned for The Gardner News, I reflected upon my own high school graduation, which had occurred 20 years earlier. At the time, it appeared graduation ceremonies for Greater Gardner’s Class of 2020 were in jeopardy due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Thankfully, there are no such concerns for the graduating members of the Class of 2023. They’ll wear their caps and gowns in the colors of their respective high schools and they’ll listen to their school administrators, classmates and guest speakers deliver eloquent and poetic thoughts about the brave new futures they’ll be walking into.

And, metaphorically speaking, I’ll be with them.

After 18-and-a-half years as a sports writer and sports editor, today is my last day with The Gardner News.

I will carry many fond memories of my time with the newspaper forward with me. My arrival at the paper in November 2004 was a moment of sheer luck. Alan Johnson, a Gardner resident and a work colleague of my father’s at the time, informed me of an opening at the paper and I applied.

When then-Sports Editor Tom Trainque informed me he was looking for a sports correspondent, I politely declined as I was already working in that capacity for The Nashua Telegraph of Nashua, New Hampshire.

Less than a week later, TGN publisher Alberta Saffell Bell called me to set up an interview for a hybrid position as a news and sports reporter. After accepting the job, I began my orientation with Tom in the sports department and, with the exception of writing one two-part feature on the Ron Burton Training Village for the news section, I have written exclusively for the sports section all these years.

Thank you, Mrs. Bell, for taking a chance on me all those years ago and bringing a sports-crazed writer from southern New Hampshire just six months out of college to Gardner. You made my dream of writing about sports for a newspaper a reality and I’ll be forever grateful to you for the opportunity to serve the Greater Gardner region’s readers.

The early years

During that first winter sports season, I covered the Oakmont boys basketball team’s journey to a district title and sat courtside at the Mullins Center on the campus of UMass when the Spartans defeated South Hadley in the Division 2 state semifinals and, ultimately, lost to Charlestown in the state final.

I was at Worcester State when the Gardner High and Monty Tech softball teams each captured district championships in the spring of 2005. I was in attendance again when the GHS softball team under the guidance of head coach Howie Klash reached the Division 1 state final in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

I saw Kyle Anderson and John Griffin torch opposing defenses during the Oakmont football team’s run to the 2006 Central/Western Mass. Division 3 Super Bowl title in the second season of Dave LaRoche’s second tenure as head coach of the Spartans.

Milestones along the way

I witnessed Gardner High freshman Elyssa Boris pitch a perfect game against Algonquin in the first start of her illustrious varsity career in 2005 and, in 2009, saw her successor as Wildcats pitching ace Julia Barrett pitched a perfect game against Milford in the Central Mass. Division 1 District semifinals. Eight years later, I reported on Quabbin Regional pitcher Ryan Malkowski becoming the first pitcher in the program's 50-year history to record a perfect game in a 3-0 Panthers win over Oakmont.

I reported on several more championship games as well as teams that fell just short of those title aspirations, and many more teams and athletes who missed the playoffs entirely. Experiencing the environment and the energy emitted by the crowd at a Clark Tournament game was always a thrill and covering the annual James Taddeo Baseball Tournament was always a rejuvenating experience each spring.

Only 57 of the region’s basketball players have scored 1,000 points in a career and I witnessed and reported on 11 of those grand milestones. In 2019, I saw Monty Tech teammates Emily St. Thomas and Erica Regan accomplish the feat during the same week in February.

I’ll never forget having the opportunity to share the story of Jon Korhonen, a Gardner High graduate who ran the 2014 Boston Marathon to raise over $54,000 for the care of his mother, Annette Korhonen, after she suffered a traumatic brain injury as the result of a stroke and a fall down a flight of stairs inside the family’s home on Chapel Street. The Korhonen family’s strength in the face of such adversity still amazes me today.

Sharing the story of Jake Downing, a young man born with a rare form of congenital heart disease, who overcame tremendous physical obstacles — including a stroke at the age of 6-and-a-half that left him with partial paralysis of his right arm and leg, and dead tissue in three areas of his brain — to become a youth baseball player and the bat boy of the 2021 North County Post 129 American Legion baseball team was an honor.

The downside of being a sports reporter for longer than the majority of the graduates in the high school class of 2023 have been alive is that you create working relationships with so many athletic directors, head coaches, assistant coaches and student-athletes that you can’t possibly give them all the proper thanks that they so richly deserve.

I can’t list you all and I would be petrified of leaving someone out if I even attempted, but just know that none of the articles I wrote were created in a vacuum. You welcomed an outsider in, you were generous with your time, and you trusted me to tell the stories — positive, negative or otherwise — that needed to be told.

I simply cannot thank you enough for that.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

To my predecessor, Tom Trainque, I thank you for bringing me into the fold, showing me the ropes, and securing my home in the TGN sports section. We made a good team during those years that our desks were tucked together in the corner on the third floor of the old Gardner News building and I truly appreciate your willingness to return as a correspondent after you left the paper in 2018. I certainly never expected my boss would become a lifelong friend, but it is definitely a happy bonus.

Thank you to Omer Cormier, the dean of Gardner News sports writers, for giving me the blueprint for how the job should be performed. You always accentuated the positive in your coverage of Gardner High football and basketball over the years and, as our coverage shifted away from game stories toward features and analysis, I’ve strived to maintain that positive tone in our coverage.

Thank you as well to Jay Gearan, Ken Powers and Mike Richard, as their passion for local sports journalism is unparalleled. Each of them can churn out a game story, which hits all of the right notes and has all of the vital details, with ease, but it is the realm of feature writing in which they all shine the brightest.

A popular adage claims a picture is worth a thousand words. Give Jay, Ken and Mike a thousand words and their articles won’t need visual accompaniment. They’ll weave together a cadence of words that flows naturally, takes the reader on a journey, evokes emotion, intimately connects the reader with the subject of the article and just may stir up a personal memory or two from within the reader’s soul.

To write in such a way is a gift, truly. Jay, Ken and Mike are storytellers who have chosen the written word as their medium and we are all better for it. They have all gone above and beyond on numerous occasions for the readers of The Gardner News and I honestly don’t know how I would have navigated the last five years, let alone the pandemic days of 2020 and beyond, without them.

For that, and so much more, they have my eternal gratitude.

Mike LeClair and Jason Patch also served as correspondents for Tom and me over the years before life took them both in a different direction, but I am thankful for their efforts and willingness to pitch in when they could. I’m even more grateful for their friendship.

Over the years there were times when we had too many games or events happening and too few writers to cover them all. That’s when our stable of freelance photographers proved to be invaluable. For the majority of my five years as Sports Editor, I’ve been able to rely on the talents of Jeffrey W. Boudreau and Mike Cormier, but also Sam Fuller, for high-quality photos that have enhanced and, at times, stood in directly for our coverage. Prior to Jeff, Mike and Sam, I had the privilege of working alongside Jim Fay and Justin Richard.

You all did tremendous work, thank you.

Before all of them, however, I worked alongside Steve Nyberg for nearly 10 years. It’s hard to believe that it has been six years since Steve died. The thought that there soon will be, if there isn’t already, a generation of Greater Gardner student-athletes who will have no memory of seeing the colorful, bespectacled, mustachioed character that was Steve Nyberg, dressed all in khaki and a sporting a green ball cap emblazoned with the words “Sports Photographer,” on the sidelines is, well, unfathomable.

But there is solace and peace of mind in knowing that to many readers of The Gardner News, Steve Nyberg was the face of the newspaper for many years. His dedication to his craft and his zest for providing TGN with not a good or great picture, but a perfect moment of action sports photography, was beyond reproach.

Wherever you are now, Steve, I hope you’re well, my good friend.

I have, for some time now, been the longest-tenured employee at The Gardner News and from that perspective, my departure signifies the end of an era.

But it also signifies the start of a new era, which is something Greater Gardner’s sports fans have witnessed over the course of the last year with the success of the Gardner High varsity boys and girls soccer, boys and girls basketball and hockey teams and the Oakmont boys basketball team, among others.

The person who takes my position behind the keyboard is going to bring new ideas and new energy to The Gardner News Sports section. They’re likely to be better versed in the role of a multimedia journalist and will have a greater understanding of connecting content with audiences via social media.

I'm excited to see how my successor ushers the TGN Sports section through the next step of its digital evolution and I hope you are, too.

I've enjoyed this job immensely.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading.

This article originally appeared on Gardner News: Hullaballou: Farewell and thanks for all of the memories