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winning team manage to win. Space was tight, and details beyond that had no chance of making the paper.
    A few interns complained about being used by the paper. There was no pay, no bylines, and no promise of promotion.The hours were long, and Ellen’s neck grew stiff while she typed in details about park league T-ball games and high school volleyball matches.
    She wouldn’t have traded a minute of it.
    She had waited tables in Petoskey and then in Ann Arbor for five long years while she earned her journalism degree. Now she was working for the
Gazette. Staff member
, her employee badge said. Ellen took the words to heart.
    As the semester drew to an end the
Gazette’s
assistant managing editor John Dower spoke to Ellen’s advanced news writing class. Dower was in charge of the news desk. He was pompous and condescending and had all the compassion of a frustrated drill sergeant. Ellen watched him size up the class of seniors and was silently thankful she worked in the sports department.
    “Right now all of you are sitting there thinking you’re hotshot reporters about to take the world of journalism by storm.” The editor sneered, pacing before the class of fifty senior journalism students. “You think you’ll breeze out of here with your University of Michigan degree and waltz your way on to the staff of some big paper like the
Gazette
.”
    He stopped and stared at them. “You’re wrong. Let me tell you how it’s going to be.” He began pacing again. “When you leave here you’ll move off to a small-town paper, which, if you’re lucky, might publish three times a week. You’ll work every department, every beat, and make half of what it costs to survive.” He stopped and smiled sardonically. “You’ll do that for five years before anyone at the
Gazette
will even consider bringing you in for an interview. Any questions?”
    Only one student in the room dared to raise a hand.
    “Does that apply to interns at the
Gazette?
” Ellen asked.
    The editor leveled his gaze in her direction and vaguely recognized her from the batch of interns currently doing time at the paper. “It
especially
applies to interns at the
Gazette
.”

    Ellen began brainstorming ways to be more valuable to the Gazette staff. Instead of asking only the routine questions when scores came in, she asked a few more, searching for news worthy of more than merely a box score. She hit pay dirt a week later, four hours into a Friday night shift.
    She was filing the information from the previous call when a score came in from a young boy named Chin Lee wishing to report the results of a junior-high basketball tournament. As Chin Lee rattled off the score, Ellen saw that the boy played for a school located in a neglected part of town. Most of the players had Asian names.
Strange. Usually the coach calls in
.
    Ellen took down the usual information and then paused a moment. “Who’s your coach, Chin?”
    The boy was quiet a moment. “Uh, well, we don’t have a coach. Is that okay?”
    Bells went off in Ellen’s head.
    “Sure, but who works with your team, who makes up the plays for you?”
    Chin hesitated. “We, uh, we get together a few times a week and watch tapes of the Los Angeles Lakers. We see their plays and we learn them. Then we use them in games.”
    Twenty minutes later Ellen had the phone numbers of the other players on Chin’s team and enough information to write a magazine article on the boys.
    She stood up from her desk and located the sports editor, Steve Simons.
    “What is it, Ellen?” He looked up from his computer screen.
    Ellen cleared her throat and proceeded to tell him. Three hours later she had written her first feature story for the
Gazette
. Simons told Ellen it would probably run in Sunday’s paper.
    On Saturday night Ellen could barely sleep. It was like being a little girl, waiting for Santa Claus to come. Only thistime he rode a bicycle and his knapsack carried nothing but a stack of newspapers. The moment