The year in my journalism: 2017
I don’t write about all the biggest stories in the news, but I get to some pretty interesting ones. I spent my year covering high school sports for The Washington Post, a beat that took me all over the D.C.-area and all the way to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
I had a lot fun and learned a lot, and I’m happy to share my best journalism here. Here are 12 of my favorite stories from 2017, and a little more about what I learned and the people I met.
‘The leading edge of a much larger iceberg’: New Jersey high school disbands football team
I spotted a brief news story on NJ.com about the West Windsor-Plainsboro North Knights and their struggle to field a varsity football team. Three days later, I was up in West Windsor visiting with Coach Jeff Reilly and hearing his take on the issues football is facing nationwide.
This story ran on A1 of The Post, my third front page story.
At Lake Braddock, sexual harassment accusations, personnel changes and lingering resentment
My investigation of Lake Braddock Secondary School and Fairfax County Public Schools started as a news tip about a coaching change in November. By July, I’d interviewed 25 people familiar with the girls’ basketball team and school district and reviewed more than 2,100 pages of documents obtained through sources and open records requests. A federal probe of the school’s handling of sexual misconduct complaints is ongoing because of my article.
“It was hard for me to talk about with my parents, but things didn’t really even happen to me,” one player said. “I said some things to my father, but I didn’t know how to tell him some of the sexual things. I tried, but I couldn’t get the words out. How do you say something like that?”
When A’s Bruce Maxwell knelt during the anthem, his college coach disagreed. Then they talked.
By a stroke of luck, I was able to reach Jan Weisberg, the baseball coach at Birmingham Southern College, where Bruce Maxwell played college baseball. He told me fascinating story about his conversation with Bruce, the first Major League baseball player to kneel in protest during the national anthem.
Leo Frank was lynched for a murder he didn’t commit. Now neo-Nazis are trying to rewrite history.
I got quite a bit of hate-email after publishing this story for The Post’s history blog. In some extremist communities, fake news has been around for a long time. This was an interesting study on how it gets weaponized.
‘There’s no place to go after eight-man’: Small towns seek to preserve football
The folks in Felch, Mich., were so kind to take in me and photographer John McDonnell to learn about eight-player football, and what small towns are left to do as their population and football’s popularity dwindle at once.
“Your football team is really on life support when you’re on eight-man, because there’s no place to go after eight-man,” North Dickinson Athletic Director Michael Roell says. “We’re hoping we can still have a football team for school pride, for homecoming, for all the things that should stay in high school.”
He nearly broke Allen Iverson’s high school scoring record. So why can’t he land a Division-I offer?
Dom Fragala from Champe High School in Aldie, Va., averaged 36.9 points per game. He was one game short of breaking Allen Iverson’s career scoring record, after spending one season in private school. But Fragala couldn’t land a college scholarship. Days after my story published, Niagara extended Fragala an offer. He accepted.
On Opening Day, Nationals fans welcome baseball back with unbridled optimism
There’s nothing like Opening Day, even for Nationals’ fans. Then — just like most years — the Nats bowed out in an early round of the playoffs.
The U.S. has invaded Britain just once. It didn’t go well.
My first story for Retropolis, The Post’s history blog, was about the first and only time American forces invaded the British Isles. It was in 1777 led by Cpt. John Paul Jones. Instead of an invasion, a bunch of sailors got drunk on shore. America still won the war.
Shohei Ohtani: The Japanese Babe Ruth vs. the real Babe Ruth? No contest.
Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Angels in December, but I took a look back at Babe Ruth’s 1918 and 1919 seasons when he transitioned from pitcher to every day position player.
“He was taught the craft of pitching, and he did it really well,” said Mike Gibbons, chief historian at the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, sitting in his office a floor above the room where Ruth was born in Baltimore’s Pigtown neighborhood. “But he thought his ability to hit the ball as far as he could was a gift from God.”
A week after NFL protests, high school teams weigh decision to demonstrate during anthem
“These conversations happen in a high school locker room,” Surrattsville Coach Cornell Wade said. “These are young men who have opinions and have feelings. I don’t know what they’re going to say, but I want them to know they have a voice.”
A rare birth defect also gave him a gift: a nearly impossible-to-hit curveball
I put my catchers gear back on and caught a bullpen for Dylan Rosnick, whose Proteus syndrome makes his curveball flutter and break, and his splitter disappear about 10 feet from the plate.
There’s a new ‘safest’ football helmet for sale. Now can anyone afford it?
I took a look at football’s newest and most technologically advanced helmet. But it costs $1,500 a pop. The cost is expected to come down over time, but right now, coaches say, there’s no way high school football as we know it could survive paying that much for equipment.
“Knowing the kids and families in my community, a helmet that expensive would make football obsolete because it would not be affordable.”
Jacob Bogage is a staff writer for The Washington Post where he writes about sports. He can be reached at jacob.bogage@washpost.com, or on Twitter: @jacobbogage.
