How you living, Rachel Ball?

The AmerCable/News-Times Scholar Athlete Awards Banquet is scheduled for next week (May 26th). This is the most hectic time of the year for me. It's also one of my favorite occasions because I get to meet some athletes I'd never spoken to before.
One of my favorite interviews this year was with El Dorado softball player and cheerleader Rachel Ball. She was refreshingly open and honest, which isn't easy for anyone who is talking to someone for the first time.
She was so easy to talk to, I felt comfortable enough to teach her a lyric from a Biggie Smalls rap track. If you see her, ask Rachel, "How you living, Rachel Ball?"
Anyway, I'm not the biggest fan of cheerleaders but she intrigued me. Most cheerleaders, if they play a sport, don't play a dirty sport like softball. There ain't nothing glamorous about softball. But, she loves it and she loves cheerleading as well.
“There are different things I like about both," she said. "They’re both competitive, especially the (cheerleading competition). That‘s when I really enjoy it. I just like being there for our football team and basketball teams. It kind of makes you apart of everything.”
One of her disappointments, she said was when the softball team had a tournament on the same day El Dorado's girls won the state basketball championship in Hot Springs.
“I didn’t get to cheer. We played in a (softball) tournament that day," she explained. "But, then I went and watched in the crowd. I did get to go. I just wasn’t there to cheer. I was there in my softball uniform. It was important for me to be there. With Whitney and Kanedria and Emily, I played with that group of girls. I stopped in the seventh grade but in the Boys Club from kindergarten all the way up to (sixth grade), I played with them. My mom actually helped coached them. It’s kind of like your team. They’re my babies.”

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I was saddened the other day when I came across an obituary for Dr. Claude Windell Sumerlin, 87, of Lynchburg, Va. He died in February of this year.
Dr. Sumerlin was my journalism professor at Henderson State University until he retired in 1988. I didn't take journalism in high school so he pretty much taught me everything I know about newspaper writing and reporting.
I don't remember many of my professors from college. But, Dr. Sumerlin is someone whom I'll never forget.