Highlights from the trail

In between all the blogging, tweeting, podcasting, videoing and other shenanigans that go into placing online news in front of your eyeballs -- as well as (fingers crossed) plopping a daily newspaper onto your stoop -- are lots of real people we meet on the beat. Now that another year of high school sporting activity has come to an end in Minnesota, let's shine some light on those people and these memorable scenes ...

• A couple of rows behind me, the loudest mouth in the gym was hard at work. As the players scrambled for a loose ball, he hollered: "On the deck! On the deck! Get it!" He let officials know how he felt, too: "That's assault and battery! Are you watching the game!?" I was informed of the following: "That guy doing the yelling? He's a very conservative Lutheran minister."

• I post live blog updates during board of directors meetings at the Minnesota State High School League. Interested parties sitting in front of their computers across the state read the posts and send immediate reaction, via text messages, to the cell phones of board members. That's what we call instant feedback.

• My middle child and I were sitting in an Indianapolis restaurant during a grad-school scouting mission. My phone rang, I jotted a few notes down on the paper placemat, then called Armstrong athletic director Patti Weldon with the breaking news that her school had just been accepted into the Northwest Suburban Conference.

• As I walked the sidelines at a Nine-man football game in little Verndale on a heavenly Friday night, the background noise was supplied by the regular blast of train horns as they chugged through town.

• The year's best hug came after Windom won the Class 1A state volleyball championship. Windom coach Ron Wendorff walked out of the victorious locker room and saw an assistant coach from Marshall. With tears in his eyes he hugged the young coach, whose team was preparing to play for the 2A title. It was his daughter, Megan.

• There's nothing like seeing snow on the warning track at an early-season baseball game ... or the calf-covering socks that have been worn by the Chisholm boys' basketball team as long as anyone can remember ... or a grandma sitting courtside at Williams Arena and knitting during the girls' state basketball tournament.

• Driving north on Interstate 35 while heading for a state tournament in downtown Minneapolis, I saw a school bus from Granada-Huntley-East Chain with fire-'em-up messages written on every last window. School spirit lives!

• A woman approached me after a game and said, "You can write in the paper that the coach's wife thought the officiating was terrible."

• A guy sitting next to me at a basketball game asked me this puzzling question: "How do the refs decide who gets the ball when it's a jump ball?" The guy was a middle school basketball coach who needs to brush up on the rules just a little bit.

• On a 4-degree evening, a 35-minute freeway drive to a game turned into a 90-minute ordeal because of very light snow. And I mean extremely light.

• I received an e-mail from a fellow who was very enthusiastic about a sport that he would like to receive more coverage. It was Ultimate Frisbee ... or maybe Ultimate Fighting. Hey, let's combine the two!

• The event was a basketball game at Northfield High. The two-man broadcast crew from hometown radio station KYMN was sitting at a table and following the action from a walkway above the bleachers, which meant they had to peek through the bars of a guard rail.

• During a wrestling tournament, a young man finished a match and sat down. He would wrestle again later in the day. An assistant coach patted the kid on the back and handed him a banana. The coach then consulted with the other coaches and came back to the kid with this executive decision: "Just eat half of it."

• During the state track meet, a message crackled across the radios that connect the folks in charge, including meet director Jody Redman of the MSHSL. The voice said: "I'm trying to get hold of Jody. Have you seen her?" She was in the media room, helping a puzzled reporter figure out how to connect to wireless Internet. That is what you call full service.

• The absolute sweetest moment of the year came during a sparsely attended baseball game in Faribault. PA announcer Cindy Barta was introducing five seniors who were about to play their final regular-season home game for Bethlehem Academy/Shattuck-Saint Mary's. Cindy had no trouble until she came to the catcher. Her voice cracking, she did a commendable, although imperfect, job of holding back the tears as she read the name "Craig Barta." Her son.

John Millea • jmillea@startribune.com