I have been involved in the voting aspect of selecting all-star lists, which is how the NTL coaches select their teams. It seems simple. Coaches nominate which players they want considered. Sometimes you have to support your nomination with stats, sometimes you don’t. If there are ten spots on the first team and ten on the second, each coach votes for their top 10 players. After tallying up the votes, whoever’s players were numbers 11, 12 and even 13 will inevitably start to state their case for why the player should be first team. Without taking a kid who was voted top-10 off the list, the first team is generally expanded to include the players who’s coach argued for them to be first team. 

This didn’t happen every season, but it’s happened enough that we now sometimes get twice or three times the number of kids on a first-team all-star list than actually play at one time in a regular game! For my list, I decided .. there’s nine players on a softball side, my list is nine players. Simple. 

I picked my individual award winners. All were fairly easy choices, except when I got to the “Newcomer”, “Rookie” or whatever I wanted to call the award for a player that was a freshman. I wanted to pick a freshman, basically because they are both a newcomer and a rookie .. it just seemed easiest. Especially this season, when such a large number of players were “new”. My first hurdle was selecting from the many outstanding players that were deserving of this particular award. I’m a numbers guy, to some extent, but I also am a coach at heart, and I like to think I see stuff that doesn’t always show up on stat lines. 

Once I made my decisions, I was happy with my award winners and I was somewhat pleased with my initial list. I fought the urge to expand the teams, to get more players recognized, but I stuck to my original plan and had my list. The last thing I wanted to do was list every player from Tioga County! I was choosing from three or four teams, some level of exclusivity is kind of the point!

I’m not here to criticize or downplay anyone else’s All-Star lists .. BUT .. as an example of how being “honored” can be somewhat watered down, the 2020 New York All-State boys Class A basketball team recognized 16 teams of five players each for post-season, All-State recognition .. plus another 70-something “honorable mention” players. I get it, New York is a huge state, with a ton of student athletes. But “honoring” 150+ of them in each of the four classes .. 600 players .. is overkill. 16 teams?!? Trust me when I tell you, there aren’t a lot of college coaches clamoring to recruit the 5’ 8” power forward that averaged just over 10 points per game for his Class A team because he was named 16th team All-State. 

Okay, my rant about that is over. 

As I was typing up my All-Star softball article, I realized that I may have screwed up. Not on the players .. which I’m sure plenty of fans will let me know I screwed that up too .. but on the name of an individual award .. “The Northern Tier West Sports Report All-Tioga County Freshman Player of the Year”. As I typed it out, a couple of things occurred to me: one, I’m going to get carpal tunnel from typing that out more than once, and two, numerous news articles and tweets came flooding back to me, reminding me that we aren’t supposed to say “freshman” anymore. 

Many colleges, high schools and a large part of society in general have began using the term “first year” to describe either a ninth-grade high school student or a college student in their first year of school. I get it. I will now probably have to delete and replace “freshman” with “first year” at least a couple dozen times a week .. but I get it. 

Now I had to rename the award tho. I didn’t like “First Year of the Year” at all. Tried “First Year Player of the Year”, “First Year Softball Player of the Year” .. I just don’t like how any of them sound. Like it’s their actual first year playing the sport, ever.

“First Year Varsity Player of the Year”? Better. But really, I can say newcomer or rookie just as well and it means the same thing. 

I thought briefly about bucking the system .. in this case, society .. and continuing to use “freshman”. I won’t do that. Without getting too argumentative or political .. if something I say or type inadvertently has the potential to offend half of the population or more, and it’s an easy fix to replace that word, I’m going to stop using said word. Not a big deal. 

And actually, as a guy that started a college career 30 years ago, and who after three slightly under-achieving years is still three credits shy of becoming a sophomore, I personally kind of like the idea of when I do go back to school someday, stating at least a bit proudly that I am a FIRST YEAR student. That sounds at least a bit better than saying I am a 30th-year freshman! 

To wrap up, I settled on “Rookie of the Year”. I know, I knocked “rookie” earlier. I think it’s kind of cliche, but we’ll go with it for now. Maybe. 

Check back here throughout the week, to see if I kept the name of the award or changed it for the sixth time, as we’ll begin posting the various All-Tioga County teams starting on Monday.