If you've never been, The Wilds is a remarkable place -- one that offers lessons if you're willing.
Every summer, I take my daughter and mother -- a 2 1/2-hour drive -- for a three-generation experience. We embark on the open-air safari and gaze with wonder at the animals roaming freely. Rhinos. Giraffes. Zebras. Endangered species. Thousands of acres of open land.
That effect is amplified when you become aware of the land's story. As recently as four decades ago, the land was used for surface mining, stripped barren. At least in that sense.
Through an intense reclamation project thereafter, that land has a second life as North America's largest conservation center.
On a summer day trip to Buffalo, I visited Tifft Nature Preserve, a free oasis of wetlands, meadows and trails just outside downtown. What once was a city landfill serves as a beautiful escape. We have one here with a similar story in the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve if you exit at University Circle but head toward Bratenahl.
The point being, there is a path to realizing and appreciating the concept of value in all its forms. In these instances, something seemingly beyond use still serves a purpose.
As we embark on another year in this space, discussing high school sports' challenges and triumphs and all its intricacy, a good place to start this journey is ensuring we all appreciate the concept of value.
You learn a lot about finding value while covering high school sports for a living.
Our industry is under increasing assault from a segment that believes our work -- through which we earn our livelihoods -- should be available for free and can be disseminated and ripped off without complaint if it's not. The irony being, of course, value is being placed on that content by consuming it -- and people perpetrating that behavior would contest it if free labor was expected within their own workplace.
So when we show up to cover high school sports year after year, with that in mind, it's a reminder providing value means you need to set an example by placing value while earning your own.
There are few feelings better in this job than when you interview a coach after an event, and your interview request for one of their student-athletes is unexpected but very much welcome.
Maybe they're not the biggest name. Maybe their contribution was fleeting.
But nonetheless, it provided value in a successful outcome.
A few years ago -- and I'll break my longstanding rule here about no identities to better convey a point given the story is positive -- I was covering a soccer match one afternoon at University.
Standard protocol for me, if a coverage area side wins, is to interview two of their student-athletes postmatch. One will be for my story, and one is on video that will later be posted on X.
The story interviews are regarded as the main component, with video interviews affording the opportunity to provide separate, complementary value to that main element of coverage.
A strike past the hour mark gave US a timely victory over a first-class foe. But the contribution to the sequence of which I couldn't leave Hunting Valley without spotlighting it, wouldn't register as an official statistic.
A reserve defender, getting minutes late in a match, sensed a ball going over the end line but had a chance to track it down from several yards out. He hustled and barely got there, then battled 1v1 with an opposing player on the endline and somehow managed a touch into flank space to pass to a teammate at the top of the box. That teammate passed to a third, who netted the match-winning strike.
Hockey assists are not a thing in high school soccer -- they shouldn't be, put it that way. But the goal doesn't happen without that hustle play to start the sequence. THAT merited a video interview to point it out. Longtime Preppers coach John Ptacek looked at me pleasantly surprised, but understood, and got that determined student-athlete for me.
From the soccer reserve who has such an intervention, to the football linemen paving the way for hundreds of yards in a key game, to the volleyball Libero digging a spike destined for the floor -- all points in between and all seasons -- we need to appreciate the mechanisms that afford programs and communities positive outcomes.
We need to appreciate the value in all facets whenever possible.
On my summer road trips, a lot of time has been spent on rural backroads in pursuit of the next destination after exiting the freeway. You see small towns. You see homes carved into the hillside. You see pavilions and ballyards, townhalls and mom and pop restaurants brimming with energy.
It's never lost on me on those backroads there's a value in life beyond my typical sight. That there are people trying to provide a life for themselves and their families, who celebrate their milestones and shoulder their adversity just like us.
When I return to Painesville after those summer trips, and as we near 27 years for me at The News-Herald with the great honor of covering high school sports for my neighbors and communities I hold dear to my heart, I always remember looking out at the world and seeing value in all its iterations.
Because when you perceive more broadly, when you recognize contribution even from a point of view perhaps off the beaten path, only then are you seeing the full picture.
Only then does value have its truest definition.
May we all strive this year and beyond to recognize and appreciate that value.