The longer I am here (now 16 months on the job as executive editor), the more I appreciate our Sports staff and its commitment to local coverage.

I have some perspective, too: For three years, 1999-2001, I was sports editor at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. That may have been my favorite job out of many, and we did some good work there, including a 20-part series looking at "Maine's Great (Sports) Events" from the 20th Century.

During one year, the Press Herald's daily and Sunday sections were ranked among the 10 best in the nation by the Associated Press Sports Editors group, for newspapers Portland's size. We were all so proud to earn that recognition.

Here at the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal, what I see is a clarity of mission -- local sports is our bread and butter -- but also strong dedication to breaking-sports news. For example, the way we covered the promotion of Paul Vachon to athletic director at Cony High and his subsequent resignation as girls' basketball coach. But there are many other examples.

In Wednesday's newspapers, our sports sections were typical -- meaning, good. The KJ led with coverage of the Dirigo-Winthrop baseball game. A good game story by Gary Hawkins was augmented by a dusty action photo by Andy Molloy and a great headline: "Ramblers' Balk-Off Win."

Bill Stewart did girls' track roundups for both newspapers that were full of names and perspective from past events.

Travis Lazarczyk at the Morning Sentinel featured the strong Skowhegan baseball team.

I also liked Travis Barrett's first-person column about an early-season canoeing trip, a piece that served as a reminder to readers that winds and water levels can be high this time of year and water temperatures are still very cold.

If you think covering local sports is easy, well, it's deceptively difficult. Consider the winter sports season: With 35 high schools in our two newspapers' coverage areas, and roughly 6-7 teams per high school per season, that means there are (easily) at least 2,100 high school varsity athletes competing in central Maine each season.

Since most winter events are held in late afternoon and (more likely) evenings, results are by nature relayed to us on deadline. It's common for us to have 1,000 or 1,500 names in our roundups and on our agate pages after a busy Friday night -- and we didn't have any of the results before 7 or 8 p.m.

The other thing is, the higher you go in sports coverage the easier it gets -- at least to cover the basics. You might be amazed at the statistical spoon-feeding journalists get if they cover professional or Division I college sports.

So, I just read the papers today and thought, "The Sports sections looked good again." I haven't written much about local sports in this blog. Seemed like a good day to do so.

As always, I'm open to your thoughts and comments.