DTH Columns

Aug. 23, 2004 — Columnist to advocate for readers

My name is Ben Couch, and I'm a lifelong sports fan.

The journey started at six weeks old, when the lack of an air conditioner led to my parents (bless their souls) taking me to that bastion of New York baseball, William A. Shea Stadium. They figured it's better to sit around and melt while taking in a baseball game.

If you doubt me, there's a picture of a certain Mets-garbed young'un at the ballpark on my fridge.

Over time, I stopped running around the seats and started keeping score with my dad, intently watching pitches and making sure my scorecard matched his, stroke for stroke.

Wanting to find out as much as I could about my beloved Mets, I began reading The New York Times sports section every day, cover to cover.

In the third grade.

I lived and died over the years with New York sports teams: the Mets, Knicks, football Giants and even the Rangers - 1994 was a good year to start watching hockey, eh?

Then I came down to the University of North Carolina and found out about the wonderful world of college sports: ACC basketball and baseball, D-1 football, the permanent dynasty of UNC women's soccer. I even had a great time covering volleyball for The Daily Tar Heel the past two fall semesters.

By now, I'm certain you're at the "Great-now-tell-me-why-I'm-reading-before-I-get-back-to-watching-the-Pit-Preacher" stage.

The reason? You're going to be reading my opinions about 15 times this semester - I'm the inaugural weekly DTH sports columnist - and I figured that knowing my background might benefit my readership.

The newly minted position of sports columnist is something we felt we owed to you, the reader.

Our team of aspiring sports journalists envisions the sports columnist commenting on the state of affairs in sport as it applies to UNC, various UNC sports and some individual UNC games.

Now, if you're picking up on a university-related focus in that last sentence, you're catching on. You, the reader, should be the winner.

We hope.

It's been a fault of the sports desk in recent years that we write columns with a more national focus than we should.

(Who was that masked man working Brooklyn and New York sports into four of six SportSaturday columns last fall?)

We also never provided you with one person who consistently wrote, depriving you of the chance to develop a reader-writer relationship - love, hate or any measure in between.

So from us at DTH sports, here's an offer for you: a relevant, witty (maybe), fun (hopefully) column written by a Brooklyn-born senior with an eye on Chapel Hill.

We're hoping to create a forum and give you a chance to chew me out, to agree with me or just to ask any question you've been dying to have answered.

You can reach me at bcouch@gmail.com - I plan on answering all e-mails that come my way - or go over my head to reach the Sports Editor by e-mailing sports@unc.edu.

Let us know what you think, what you think we think or what you want to know. It might even come back to you in the form of a "mailbag" column comprised of some of the e-mails we've received.

Here's to hoping I'm not talking to myself all semester.

Not like I don't do that anyway.