In my parents’ pink insulation filled crawlspace in Rochester, NY, there is an entire Rubbermaid underbed container of programs. Ice show programs. Football programs. Hockey programs. Huge 11×17 full color programs. Black and white home inkjet printer printed programs.
When I was a fifteen year old, there were three things in this world I obsessively saved my babysitting money for: tickets to sporting events, programs at said events, and the amazingly delicious hot-out-of-the-oven M&M cookies baked at the deli next door to my dance studio. And when you were making three dollars per hour babysitting in the Rust Belt, those three things were the only meaningful things one could save up for.
Programs were one of the reasons I would attend games and shows. When I was really young, my hands would shake nervously when I would hand over my hard-earned money for a hockey or ice show program. I would insist on getting to events right when doors opened so that I would have as much time with the program prior to the puck drop, first pitch, kickoff, or opening piece. I would devour the program the minute I sat down. I loved the smell – that toxic ink plastic-like brand new smell that graced the pages, especially if this was the beginning of the season or tour or the first one in the box. The pages would stick together upon that first read through, which made me develop this unconscious habit I still have today of flipping through the program at a rapid pace at first to separate all of the pages before settling in to fully digest the content.
Anyone who attended anything with me usually knew prior to our departure of my love of programs and the fact that they would most likely be on their own so that I could read every single word of it before the event started. I didn’t mean to be rude, but to me, reading the program was usually better than the event itself.
Somewhere around the age of thirteen, I wondered if there was any way to write just for event programs. I jumped at the chance to contribute to my school’s theater programs whenever possible, but I really wanted to write for a ice show program or hockey program. I would occasionally ask one of my creative writing teachers how one might go about writing for an event program, and they looked at me like I had five heads (which, given that I was this wanna-be sportswriter in a creative writing program filled with classmates focusing on teenage-angst filled poetry, was an everyday occurrence. In workshop, I shared fiction pieces about a klutzy female sportswriter tripping over her own feet while covering her favorite quarterback’s Pro Football Hall of Fame induction, while the rest of my class shared poems about boys breaking up with them and feeling like an outsider in such a “crazy, crazy world.”)
Fast forward nearly fifteen years, with late twenty-something me working in education, dabbling in sports blogging, and living hundreds of miles away from Rochester. My father called me one Sunday afternoon asking if I wanted to keep the Rubbermaid box of programs. He was in one of his rare cleaning moves, and he was feeling the urge to purge the crawlspace.
“Of course I do, Dad,” I answered, taken aback that anyone would ever suggest throwing my precious memorabilia out. “If you hang onto them until Christmas, I’ll bring them back to Boston with me then.”
Dad obliged and went about purging my old Girl Scout Handbooks instead (with my permission.) But his question got me thinking. I’ve found an outlet for one teenage goal, sportswriting, through the six gazillion websites I attempt to contribute to on a regular basis. However, I had never found an opportunity to work on an event program. I had to remedy this, and the opportunity was literally under my nose.
The folks in charge of coordinating the Boston University-Cornell University Red Hot Hockey rematch had moved into the offices below my own. Normally, I’m not a bold person when it comes to asking to be included on projects, but I overheard them mentioning that they were in the beginning stages of putting together the program, and I jumped on it. Pete, the creative lead, immediately gave me the chance of a lifetime – design and write both BU and Cornell’s player profiles.
I have not worked that hard on a project since my senior thesis. When Cornell was ravaged by their H1N1 outbreak and couldn’t provide us with the necessary information on deadline, I ended up researching stats and facts for the entire Cornell roster. I made drafts upon drafts, measured every pixel I could, learned options and functions in Adobe InDesign I never knew existed. Then I was allowed to write a sidebar. Then I was allowed to fact check and edit a major story.
Then, last Thursday, I walked up to my office after a series of meetings and found one of the first copies of the program waiting for me at the front desk. It smelled just like the programs I had saved up to buy as a teenager, had the same glossy cover as those programs, but when you opened to the table of contents and read the credits at the bottom, my name was listed.
I can’t even begin to describe what it felt like to read a program and see my name in the credits after a childhood spent obsessed with them. I immediately thought of my first Disney on Ice program at age four that I dragged with me everywhere for three weeks, the Buffalo Bills Gameday program I bought the only time I got to watch Steve Young play live, and the beautiful ice show programs I collected as a tweenager. Honestly, I wanted to go back in time and tell fifteen year old me what had just happened and then do a Jonathan Papelbon-esque happy jig with her. Knowing this would eventually happen would have made sitting through the boy-angst filled verse over a decade ago that much more palpable.