What A Rush

Before I get to the good part (the newscast), I have to start with the weekly neverending story to find a story. After emailing Professor Nicholson at least six times on Wednesday with futile wrap ideas, I finally settled on a story about a proposal for artificial turf at Fayetteville-Manlius High School. Not a great story but a current one nonetheless. It took me until about 1:30 to conduct the interview with the assistant principal, and by the time I got back to 480 it was about 2 pm. So I had an hour and a half to write the story, find my bite, and voice the tracks.

I took care of everything for my wrap by about 3:20 pm, about 35 minutes before Team B's cast. It wasn't until I was done my wrap that the real fun began. After being in a state of calm most of the day, I could sense the tension rising as precious moments passed by. Jordan was busy writing stories and trying to quickly organize the stories and bites on to the carts, Lara was trying to assemble all the stories as the anchor (and conduct a phoner as well), and Noel had to get her story done in a ridiculously short amount of time. That last half-hour had some of the most hectic minutes of school I can remember.

Long story short, we got it done. After getting everything together, I was actually very nervous in the booth and I wasn't even doing anything. Since we had done so much in that last half-hour, seeing it all come together was such an adrenaline rush. Major props to the team. Jordan did a great job of organizing everything and getting stuff onto carts (and timing the show perfectly), Lara had barely looked at the scripts before reading them and didn't miss a beat, and Noel must have gotten her wrap done in record time because she didn't come in until relatively close to deadline and still cranked it out. All in all a solid effort all around.

Hopefully things will be just as good next week. And hopefully the Phillies will still be playing by then, but they're actually going to have to win some games first before that happens.