Put Me In Coach -- Snowball fight doesn't go quite as planned

By Rudy Coggins
Published in Sports on February 28, 2015 11:11 PM

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The weather was not going to stop me again.

So when the snow hit on Tuesday afternoon and I was sitting in the News-Argus sports office wondering if sports would ever be played in Wayne County again, I decided to take things into my own hands.

Instead of sitting around and staring at my computer screen, I left work. Yeah, I played hooky from work. I'm not proud of it, but I did it.

And I went to go see if there was anything I could do for this column.

We found a kid putting together a six-foot tall snowman.

I tried to find a sled and hit the slopes. No luck.

Finally I decided on a snowball fight. What better way to spend a snow day than chucking ice balls at helpless teenage kids. I sent out a tweet to all 2,200 of our followers on the News-Argus sports account, and waited for the responses to trickle in from all the kids who wanted to throw snow balls at a sports reporter.

Would you like to know how many kids showed up at Minaweil Park?

Zero.

Zero kids attended my snowball fight.

I've never felt so unpopular.

So I did what I always do. I improvised.

I convinced News-Argus features reporter Kirsten Ballard to be my opposition.

She obliged.

I wish I could say Kirsten was a worthy adversary on the pearl white battleground. But that would be a lie. Kirsten is about as good at snowball fighting as I was at football.

She spent most of the time hiding behind a tree.

During our 30-minute fight, I hit Kirsten with about 75 snowballs. She hit me three times. Two of the times she "hit" me, I actually caught her snowball and threw it back at her.

You might be thinking to yourself, 'Allen you should really feel good about yourself bullying the helpless little feature reporter in a snowball fight.'

To which I would say, 'yes I do.'

Look, when you have been as bad at everything as I have been, you take all the victories you can get. And this was a victory for me.

It was a victory until the final snowball.

Kirsten used her cunning and wit to divert my attention away from her as she built a mini snow man. Her mini snowman was about a foot tall, with pine needles as eyes, and a leaf for a mouth. No nose and no ears. Snowmen don't need to smell or hear apparently.

Just as I began to lose focus and admire her miniature Frosty, Kirsten picked up her snowman and threw the entire thing, hitting me directly in the chest.

Kill shot.

Lucky for me, no one was there to see her and our photographer Casey Mozingo missed the photo op.

And you know what they say. In the words of the wisest man I've never met, George Feeny: You got photos? You got nothin'.

Allen Etzler is the News-Argus sportswriter who got stood up by the entire town of Goldsboro for a snowball fight. He can be reached at aetzler@newsargus.com or you can follow him on Twitter @newsargusal.