Last week I traveled to Raleigh at the invitation of the North Carolina Press Association. I won a NCPA Award in the Features Series category two years ago so the organization honored me, and others of my ilk, with an invitation to spend the day judging the Nebraska Press Association’s 2005 entries.

I know it sounds like free labor, but I prefer to think of it as an honor.

About 60 journalists from around North Carolina gathered in a conference room at the Beta Center in Raleigh for a day of grading papers. The judging panel was short a few sports reporters (a breed of journalists that sees actual work as time that could be better spent watching ESPN), so I ventured outside my normal realm of expertise (whatever that is) and judged sports photography for a few hours.

So what do folks in the Cornhusker State regard as good fun when it comes to sports? Well, pretty much the same things we do. There were photos of football, baseball, basketball and track competitions plus an abnormally high number of shots from rodeos. If you haven’t been to a rodeo in the past decade or so, there’s a new event designed to allow the younger cowboys and cowgirls to get some boot scootin’ action. It’s called “mutton busting” and it involves a sheep running for its life while a human kid—sometimes as young as four or five—rides on top. Eventually the sheep sheds its passenger and the boy or girl with the longest ride time is declared the winner.

The Nebraska Press Association sports photo contest was filled with mutton busting pictures. I suppose the photographers thought that combining cute-yet-terrified kids with cute-yet-terrified sheep was a no-lose proposition for the contest. Sorry, guys. We on the judging panel were looking for athletes a little more mainstream than pre-school mutton busters.

The sports photography contest was divided into several divisions based on the size of the paper involved and then into the “feature” and “action” shot categories. One of the best feature sports shots came from a small newspaper photographer (I mean the newspaper was small, I don’t really know if the photographer was). The photograph showed the bench and stands during the latter stages of a high school basketball game in the Nebraska State Tournament. All of the guys on the bench were slumped in despair—one even had a towel over his head to avoid watching the carnage on court. It was obvious by their faces that it had just become the moment of no return—that point in the game when no comeback is possible. Their season was over.

Behind the bench were five or six rows of fans rooting for the winning team. They were ecstatic with the knowledge that they would live to play another round in the championship tournament. Some were screaming. Some were pumping their fists in the air. A group of high school girls decked out in Mardi Gras beads and smiles wider than their actual faces were holding each other and swaying.

You could see about a hundred faces in the photo and each one conveyed character and emotion. Between the faces of the fans in the stands and the losing team on the bench, you didn’t really need a caption to tell you all that was happening at that moment.

You don’t really see that many art-quality photographs in smaller newspapers, especially on the sports pages. But that winning one from small town Nebraska was certainly one of them.

Being able to reward that photographer for her work was one of the moments when last week’s judging process truly was an honor for me. Another was discovering The Grand Island Independent, a medium-sized daily paper in central Nebraska with a circulation of 18,000 (small by eastern daily standards).

As the grading process wore on from the morning into the early afternoon, the name “Grand Island Independent” kept coming up among judges. When I was judging the “feature series” category, I found out why. Among the top five entries in that category, three of them were easily from that one newspaper. The paper devoted a five-part series to a coming bond referendum on a new prison to be located near Grand Island. It included interviews with all of the jailers, historical perspectives of the old prison, detailed explanations on the costs of the new facility, artists’ drawings of what the prison would look like, and much more. The newspaper’s other feature series on Alzheimer’s disease, tornadoes and middle schools were equally as comprehensive and interesting.

The judges I spoke with at the contest were all blown away by the quality of The Independent. It is, quite simply, one of the best local newspapers in the country. You can check it out at www.theindependent.com.

The Independent made me proud to work in this field known as print journalism and also made me determined to help make The Mountain Times the best local newspaper it can possibly be.

Thanks for reading.