COLUMN: Thanks for kind words on 'Next Level'

     I want to start by thanking everybody who has commented to me, in recent weeks, about The Next Level, the series profiling the many former Monticello High School athletes who have gone on to compete in college.

     It’s great to know the feature is not only being read, but appreciated. I only regret that I didn’t start doing something like this long ago. I now feel it could be a recurring feature, as current MHS students finish up and take their talents to area colleges and universities.

     Just for the record, this year’s feature is done for now, but it’s only taking a sabbatical. There are (at least) three former Panthers who are still taking the field in college, and my plan is to feature them in August as football season approaches.

     There is also the possibility that I missed someone from one of the other sports, and if so, please let me know so I can include that person as well.

     It’s been kind of fun, and relatively easy. The work has pretty much been done by the college students. Through Facebook, I contacted them to see if they were interested in participating. Then I supplied them with some basic questions, which I tweaked to fit their particular sports, and they replied, also through Facebook messaging.

     All I had to do, then, was copy-and-paste the answers into our news article format, read through them to clean up grammatical things and style things, and there I was.

     The trickiest part was trying to collect photos of them competing in college. Sometimes these came from the students themselves, sometimes the colleges – which for the most part were very happy to help out – and sometimes parents or other sources.

     I was hugely impressed by the answers to the questions. I really had to do very little fixing-up, and what you saw was almost entirely, and exactly, what they sent me. It was exciting to see that these people are not only outstanding athletes, but very strong writers as well.

     Some of the answers were expected, particularly the recurring theme that college sports represent a much larger commitment than those in high school. And that nearly all of them had to make the adjustment of going from being a star in high school to one of many stars on the college team.

     One answer that kept showing up was that many of them are still competing because they simply loved their respective sports so much that they didn’t want them to end.

     I don’t want The Next Level series to end, either.