Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

Marcus Vaughn, Del Malloy and I won't be this comfortable Thursday morning at Franklin. 

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while waiting for four new tires to be put on the Panzer before the holiday rush:

** As I mentioned in my last post, I've been a really busy guy of late. But my football season is on the home stretch, as I have finalized at least two of potentially three assignments leading up to the end of the football season and the start of basketball and hockey.

First, of course, Del Malloy and Marcus Vaughn will be at my side in the top of the bleachers at Franklin High's Pisini Stadium for the annual Thanksgiving rivalry game between the host Panthers and the team I've followed non-stop for the past seven seasons, the King Philip Warriors.

Following that, I'm awaiting word as to whether I'll be announcing the MVADA Medium Division title game between Tri-County and Blue Hills -- the third time in a row that those teams will meet in a vocational bowl title game. The date, time and site for that game has yet to be set.

And finally, I'll be the local voice for North TV's delayed telecast of the MIAA Division 2 Super Bowl between Catholic Memorial and Bishop Feehan on Saturday (3:30 p.m.) at Gillette Stadium. We can't do the game live because of the MIAA's contractual obligations to Kraft Sports and Entertainment Productions. but I promise that I'll know more about the Shamrocks than whomever they find to announce the game. 

The job of calling the Division 3 title game on Friday night between King Philip and North Attleboro will go to North TV's North-based crew of Jared Ware, Ethan Hamilton and Anthony Pirri, and I know they'll do a good job. That, too, will have to be shown on a delayed basis. I'll certainly be watching that on live TV and the later re-broadcast, and I hope I don't spend too much time shouting at my TV screen over what mistakes the Kraft-hired announcers make.

In case you're wondering why I mention this, it's because I do admit to some pique over not being able to continue my job of being the TV "voice" of the Warriors in the postseason. And that's not North TV's fault.

All year long, I and my crew have followed KP every step of the way. The only game we didn't do was when the North crew drew the assignment of the regular-season game between the teams at North Attleboro's Beaupre Field, which is our standard operating protocol.

Otherwise, we were on the KP beat either at Macktaz Field, or at the visiting venues like Natick, Taunton and Foxboro. And once the playoffs started, we were in our seats inside the KP press box, often sharing our call with the other cable systems from the KP towns.

This has been my "home" for the last seven years.

But once we reach the semifinal round, the MIAA takes over. The state association has sold broadcast rights to the National Federation of High Schools Network, and they have the exclusive rights. In past years, North TV got the rights to provide that coverage to the NFHS Network, and originally, I was supposed to call two games this past Saturday -- the Division 5 semifinal between Foxboro and Archbishop Williams and the Malden Catholic vs. King Philip D3 semifinal, both at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School. I was stoked for the assignment for exactly one day, until I learned that because of a prior contractual agreement, another production company would be handling both games.

C'est la vie, as they say. I watched about half of the Foxboro game, went to the KP game (and sat in the stands) and then watched the NFHS replay later to check my in-game chart. The other outfit did a good job, but it still bothers me that after covering KP football non-stop for the past seven years, the MIAA and the NFHS Network have the right to take coverage away from the companies that follow a team all year long and hand it off to someone else because they paid the rights fees for it.

It's like the commercial for the investment company in which two parents are sitting in a packed high school auditorium watching graduation, and when their kids get their diplomas, their names are announced as the names of local businesses. "Oh, we sold the rights to our kids' names, like stadiums do," they claim, because it's so expensive to raise kids these days.

(By the way, the guy that stands up after the son's name (now the same as that fellow's tanning salon) is announced, and says, "If you need a tan, I'm your man," should get an Emmy or something. It's the most believable moment in the entire commercial.)

Stadium naming rights can be sold. I get it. But the rights to televise high school sports? For heaven's sake, this isn't the NFL. The MIAA certainly would not dare selling the rights for print media to cover their tournament games exclusively to the highest bidder ... or did I just give them an idea? God, I hope not.

** I've also been going to a few other games I haven't had to announce, including Tri-County's two playoff games in the state vocational bowl. The Cougars have been a fun team to watch this year -- just one loss on their schedule heading into a rematch with Blue Hills (their third straight championship game meeting). I did one of their games, against South Shore Voke, and the Cougars ran off 22 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to win that one. QB Declan Walker and RB/WR Nick O'Brien have had record-shattering seasons for coach Andy Gomes, who used to quarterback the Norton Lancers many years ago. 

Declan Walker has had a terrific
season for Tri-County's Cougars.

But during their first-round game against Worcester Tech at Xaverian Brothers High, I saw something I had never seen before in well over 50 years of high school sports coverage. The clock operator, a member of the officiating crew, just shut off the clock and left in the second quarter of play because it was too loud for him inside the press box.

This gentleman was an older fellow (but I doubt he was older than I am), and the press box at the X is a one-room structure that must be shared with media and public-address announcers. It can get a little loud there, and as Xaverian has served as Tri-County's home site this year during construction of the new T-C, the job of announcing has gone to a Tri-County parent.

He's a nice guy, and a little loud and excitable, that's true -- but as Tri-County has been displaced from its home and is having a great football season despite the inconvenience, the idea has been to use any means possible to stoke excitement among the Cougar faithful. In that contained space of the press box, the announcer's enthusiasm was magnified, but for those of us with jobs to do -- me to chart the game and a Milford-based TV crew to broadcast it -- the rule of thumb was not to let it distract us from those jobs. Easily enough done.

The clock operator was clearly bothered by it all, however, and he let his displeasure be known several times in increasingly aggressively tones. After a while, he took to berating the announcer and threatening to leave -- which he finally did, shutting off the power to the scoreboard and charging out the door with a few choice profanities left behind for good measure, leaving everyone on the field to wander about and wonder what exactly in the Sam Hill was going on.

This is my job. And that's what I focus upon.

After maybe about an investigatory pause of 15-20 minutes, someone was found to run the clock and play resumed. 

During that first quarter, I overheard several efforts by the clock operator to contact the officials on the field through a radio hookup, looking for someone to replace him, to no avail. If there truly was a problem, that would have been the proper course of action to follow -- contact the officials, they contact the site director (in this case, T-C AD Sara Martin), and she addresses the problem. But the clock guy had no business taking matters into his own hands as he did -- and then to do so as unprofessionally as possible. 

I am reminded of the mantra Bill Belichick employed throughout his tenure as Patriots' coach -- "Do your job." Everyone else in that press box did their job except one guy -- and since nobody was deliberately preventing him from performing his tasks, well, if he can't shut out the distractions and perform them, then maybe it's time to step aside and shake his fist at the moon on his own time.

** The next game I attended in Tri-County's tournament run was at Stoughton High's new football field. It was my first visit there since it was finished, and I have to say, they did an absolutely terrific job of it. It's a beautiful venue.

And by the way, if there are any athletic directors or school building committees looking for templates from which to build a new press box, I have three suggestions -- Stoughton High, North Attleboro's Beaupre Field and the Sam Berns Community Field at Foxboro High. All three have partitioned rooms for media, game officials and coaches, and excellent views of their fields. And given that the future of high school sports media coverage appears to be in streaming video, that's something that needs to be considered in future construction.

** There will be a lot of criticism of the MIAA in the days to come over its choices of tournament venues that don't have adequate facilities for media, and I must sadly add my voice to that because one of the venues most worthy of criticism is my alma mater, Mansfield High.

We're trying to fix things, folks. Really!

As a Mansfield taxpayer that voted for the funding to undertake the improvements, I'm a big fan of the upgrades of Alumni Field over the past year or so. But unfortunately, Mansfield High remains a black hole when it comes to a wireless Internet signal or a wired Internet connection inside the press box. The result for the Feehan vs. Bridgewater-Raynham football semifinal was an annoyingly choppy broadcast (by our North TV crew, unfortunately) that drew a lot of online criticism from those that felt they wasted their money in purchasing it.

Full disclosure here -- I work for Mansfield Cable Access a lot in the wintertime, doing boys' and girls' basketball games. And the poor-quality Internet signal inside the Albertini Gym was addressed with the addition of wired connections, but apparently, those are proprietary to Mansfield Cable Access. Same with the wired connection inside the football press box. I was a beneficiary of that as well this fall when I announced a couple of boys' soccer games from there, but it was not available for the NFHS crew last Friday, and the weak cellular signal in the general area of Mansfield High was insufficient.

Mansfield has been a very willing and generous host to postseason games, and that is always much appreciated by everyone involved. But the MIAA and NFHS need to establish standards for Internet accessibility if they are going to continue to charge the public for telecasts from there and any other site chosen to host a postseason game. Again, with media coverage of high school sports shifting more toward video and away from print, it's time to consider that a different type of media has a different set of needs.

** Speaking of basketball telecasts, my first one of the season is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 12 at 6 p.m. from Mansfield High as the Hornet girls take on Medway in their season-opening contest. There are high hopes for the Hornet girls this year, and Alex Salachi and I will man our familiar positions next to that terrific wired Internet connection to bring you all the coverage live at mansfieldcableaccess.com.

** With Bishop Feehan having made it to the D2 Super Bowl against Catholic Memorial, a lot of commenters on social media are now lumping Feehan in with the larger Catholic schools as an example of how private schools shamelessly recruit their athletes from all over the state in order to dominate MIAA competition.

This is unfortunate and false in Feehan's case.

Feehan is a victim of its own success, in a way -- and not necessarily on the athletic fields. It is almost literally the "last man standing" in southeastern Massachusetts in terms of Catholic education. It is by far the largest of any of the Catholics south of Route 128, with an co-educational enrollment of about 1,100 students (a few more girls than boys). The number of boys in the school is far less than for the all-male juggernauts of the Catholic Conference such as CM, St. John's Prep, and Xaverian, but Feehan automatically gets the divisional bump-up for being a Catholic school -- and is more akin to the schools competing in Division 3.

At the beginning of the season, here's how the breakdown of Feehan's football athletes from their home communities shaped up: North Attleboro 17, Norton 10, Attleboro 6, Easton 6, Rehoboth 5, Cumberland, R.I., 3, Foxboro 3, Mansfield 2, Plainville 2, and one apiece from Lincoln, R.I., North Providence, R.I., East Providence, R.I.; Rumford, R.I., Raynham, Canton, Lakeville, Norfolk, Medfield, Walpole, Seekonk and Wrentham. Using the circulation area of The Sun Chronicle as the boundaries of what I call "local," that means that Feehan attracted 48 of its football players from a specific and limited region and 18 from outside it -- but not very far.

By the way, 24 of those athletes came from local towns whose own high schools are playing in next week's MIAA Super Bowls. North Attleboro, in particular, seems to be doing all right despite losing 17 potential players to Feehan, given that the Rocketeers will be defending their Division 3 title on Friday night against King Philip.

Feehan still isn't a "top-tier" Catholic.

Feehan has definitely bucked a trend where Catholic education is concerned in this part of the commonwealth. Coyle-Cassidy, Bishop Connolly and Sacred Heart of Kingston have all closed in recent years. Enrollments are down at Bishop Stang, Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Williams, which is one reason why Feehan is leaving the Catholic Central League and undertaking life as an independent in the effort to find more equitable competition for all of its athletes, male and female.

Some people like to use a broad brush and paint Feehan in the same light as its much-larger Catholic brethren because of things that happened almost 30 years ago. That's a shame, because I don't see what they're seeing. I see a vibrant academic and athletic community that offers its students a faith-based environment, which some folks see as preferable to public education. But I don't see dominance or smugness -- which is why, after so many years, I keep beating the drum of how Feehan belongs in the Hockomock League. Feehan's mission is far more aligned with the majority of those 12 schools than it is with the single-sex Catholics that draw the ire of those that complain the most.

One final disclaimer: While I did not attend Feehan, I probably started on a track to do so in 1959 when I entered the long-since-closed Dominican Academy in Plainville. But the nuns there beat the faith right out of my soul, to the point where my parents had to put me in the Mansfield school system starting in seventh grade. I survived and thrived there, and I know Catholic education today shares nothing in common with my first six years. I've had nothing but a great relationship with Feehan throughout my entire adulthood, and that's why I hate it when people cast undeserved aspersions upon it.

** Finally, a wish to all of you to enjoy a happy Thanksgiving. By my count, this will be the 61st Turkey Day in which I have been in attendance at a holiday football game (either covering or just watching), so the day probably has a different significance to me than it has for you.

But yes, I have something to be thankful for this year. A dear friend recently had the third major surgery of her lifetime, but the good folks at Brigham and Women's did their jobs and she is well on the way back to good health. Thanks to the professionals who used science and technology to heal her.

See you on the basketball courts!

MARK FARINELLA still has the scars on his knuckles from where Sister Mary Rita used to swing away at them with a brass-tipped ruler, her swing as powerful as Ted Williams in his prime. You can send notes of sympathy or understanding to him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.