I covered HS sports in North St. Louis County for 20 years

Posted on: March 10, 2024 at 22:41:33 CT

I did hundreds of feature stories on African-American kids from all those schools including the Hazelwoods. Most of the kids in those schools are good kids who try to do the right things, and then there is the 5 percent that want to take everyone down. It's a shame.

I remember in all my years covering sports up there the nicest, and most polite kids were the ones on the Berkeley track team. That's because their coach, Rod Staggs, would not have it any other way. If I would have told him one of his kids was disrespectful to me, he would have ripped the kid a new a-hole and kicked him or her off the team. He had the power to do that because his teams were so successful, and the kids respected him.

There were many times I would cover a basketball game up there and be the only white person in the gym except for a few of my kids who I would take (my wife used to give hell about taking our kids with me). But I always felt completely safe because the people knew I was helping their kids. Before the Internet, that was how a lot of the small colleges found out about a kid was by seeing a story about them in the paper. A lot of those kids got scholarships from those stories and got out.

The shame of it is that North County has really gone off the rails. The ones I really feel sorry for are the older people who have lived there for 40 years and took care of their property and now can't give it away.