In late January, a photographer at work told me about an unusual basketball game. It was just a normally scheduled game, but the stands were packed, everyone was dressed in school colors and the atmosphere was electric.

Turns out it was a rivalry game, but not just any rivalry game. Anacortes High School had asked Burlington-Edison High School if they would be their rival. The story is here, but the short version is Anacortes has lost students over the years and their previous rivalries have disappeared as Anacortes has moved down a league or two. School administrators and students wanted to ramp up school spirit.

I decided right then and there that I had to write a story about it.

A secret: I am a huge sucker for school spirit. This may brand me as a dork or a nerd, but I always dressed up as whatever spirit day it was when I went to high school. Wear green and gold day? Check. Injury day? Leg braces, an arm sling and crutches. By the time senior year rolled around, I was voted as “most spirited girl” in the senior superlatives. This was a huge surprise to me because I thought I wasn’t that popular.

So in short, the nerd in me was intrigued. I thought it was cute that another school would ask another to be its rival.

Reporting the story was a challenge because the game had already happened. Not only that, when the photographer worked the game, they were shooting a basketball game, not the fans. It took me a couple of weeks to get all of the reporting done. I had to find snippets of time between my other assignments to fit it into my schedule.

In the few days before it ran, I kept poking and prodding the story: twisting a sentence here, changing a phrase there, double and triple checking my spelling. I actually woke up in a panic the night before it ran because I was afraid that something was wrong.

I was really happy with the finished story. Turns out a lot of the staff had read it before it went in the paper and they started sharing stories of their high school days (who knew we had three former cheerleaders in our newsroom?). One person even said they wished they could have gone to the game after reading the story.

This post is the first in a monthly series, Story of the Month.

3. Trent Henderson follows in his father’s footsteps

At the time when this story was written, the Mitchell Report was in the forefront of many players’ minds. Talking with a baseball scout and the players about steroids gave this story extra context. I am also grateful that my editors gave me time to work with the sports department to write this story. I’ve always enjoyed writing sports stories, and this was one of two I wrote in 2008.

2. A standard for failure

One of the most challenging tasks for reporters is making sure government speak is translated so an average reader can understand. I am not sure how often I succeed, but I think I did with this story. Every year in August, the results for the Washington Assessment for Student Learning are released to the public. And every year, reporters struggle with how to present that information to their readership. The data is complicated and it’s difficult to sum up that amount of information into an easy-to-digest format.

I had thought about how to do this for weeks, when I had an idea. Long story short, there are about three dozen categories schools must pass in No Child Left Behind. If the school fails one, the entire school fails. So I measured how many categories each school had passed as a percentage of the total they measured against (because not all schools use each category). The result is a tidy bar graph for each 10th-grade class in the county. A reader can quickly glance at the graphs and compare other districts’ 10th graders. They can also see that every district has lost ground because the standards have risen.

The story also gave school officials a chance to vent about the system. This was my first year reporting on the WASL results. Next year I’ll definitely reach out to more parent groups and students to gauge their thoughts.

1. Budget cuts could hit MV libraries

As much as students complain about homework and going to school in general, they sure love their libraries. The Mount Vernon School District threatened to cut librarian positions by about half early in the year. One of the activities students would lose were the brown bag concerts on Fridays, where student bands got to perform in the library. The energy during the last brown bag was amazing, as the audio for the piece can attest.

So this isn’t a top 3 best stories of the year. It’s the top 3 stories where I had the most fun reporting them. I’ll provide links to the stories so you can read them if you like.

3. B-E students see Chehalis devastation firsthand

To anyone who knows me, this is a no-brainer. I love writing about the weather. I really like getting out of the office and I love creating audio companion pieces. See my previous post for more commentary.

2. Local grabs brass ring, Loveland H.S. grad gets Tony nomination

I love Jamie Lee Curtis and I loved the movie “Legally Blonde.” So guess how excited I was when I found out a Loveland High School graduate was nominated for a Tony award for her script of the musical version of “Legally Blonde”? As soon as my editor pitched it I knew I had to write it.

The second paragraph of the story says it all. Heather Hach, whose parents still live between Loveland and Fort Collins, were gracious enough to meet with me for the story. Heather had also written the screenplay for “Freaky Friday.” I was a bit starstruck when I first called, but she was so down-to-earth I calmed down pretty fast.

Then Heather told me she was talking with Reese Witherspoon about an upcoming screenplay of “When Bees and Honey Drown.” Like, I almost died!

1. Forrest, Baldomir a long way from Las Vegas or New York to claim vacant title

This was the first story I wrote after moving to the Seattle area. I had been out of practice for a while and I was really nervous. Eric and I live north of Seattle about 45 minutes, and Tacoma is about 2 hours if there’s no traffic. It took me about three hours to get there, and because traffic was so slow, I was taking down observations in my audio recorder.

It was really cool meeting such high-caliber boxers in person. In May I visited Las Vegas with some of Eric’s family, where they had to pay $50 each to see the Mayweather-De La Hoya bout — on closed-circuit television. Tickets to see the Forrest-Baldomir match were about $100 each if memory serves. I must add that this story wouldn’t have been nearly as good if Gregg Bell had not edited it and added such great local context (like the paper mill detail).