Insight: The Master of Disaster

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

When you work for a large daily newspaper, as I have done previously in my career in journalism, you learn that it takes many different skills to obtain a great story, but sometimes just being resourceful can make a difference too.

The April 1, 2011 sports section of
Florida Today newspaper featured
a story by Ed Pierce about a local player
competing in the NCAA men's basketball
tournament Final Four. COURTESY PHOTO   

In March 2011, I was working as the Community Sports Editor for a daily newspaper in Florida coordinating coverage of Little League baseball, youth football, youth soccer and youth basketball for our seven weekly newspapers. When needed, I would be asked to assist the daily newspaper by covering prep sports games or other community sports events like a triathlon or Iron Man competition.

At 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning, the daily newspaper’s sports editor stopped by my desk and asked if I could do a final search for an athlete possibly from our area who was about to play in the NCAA men’s college basketball Final Four. The sports editor explained to me that he had tasked several sportswriters to develop an article about this athlete and they both had come up empty.

While watching Virginia Commonwealth University’s NCAA Tournament game on television the previous weekend, the newspaper’s executive editor had observed a crawl note at the bottom of the TV screen that listed the hometown of VCU point guard Joey Rodriguez as Merritt Island, Florida and within our coverage area. Neither sportswriter knew Rodriguez from high school sports games nor were they able to find out anything about him.

VCU was flying to San Antonio, Texas that same day and players would not be able to be interviewed, so I was kind of the last hope for the newspaper to see if we could obtain details about this athlete.

I started by speaking with both sportswriters to see what methods they had used to track down Joey Rodriguez. Our newspaper had extensive digital archives, and the sportswriters had searched for his name in our database in high school basketball box scores without success. They had also checked with Merritt Island High School’s basketball coach, who was in his first season and had been hired after coaching at another school across the state, and said he didn’t know Joey.

My next step was to inquire from the newspaper’s Information Technology department how far back our digital archives went. I was told this was the fifth edition of the archives and it was updated every 10 years or so, so I asked how I could access the fourth edition. I searched for his name and found one listing for him and that was as a player on a winning 3-on-3 youth basketball tournament team from 12 years in the past.

But I also spotted a name I recognized as one of Joey’s teammates on that youth basketball team by the name of Danny Verpaele. I had covered Verpaele when he was a star quarterback for Merritt Island High School a few years before. I wondered what he was doing now and so I googled his name. I learned that he had played college football at the University of South Florida and had just been named to the coaching staff at Jacksonville University.

I then went to the website for Jacksonville University football, searched the coaching directory, found his name and sent him an email asking if he knew Joey Rodriguez. To my surprise, he was in the office and on his computer at that very moment. He answered me right away and said I should call him right then. I did and he said that at one time, his family lived next door to Joey’s family and they were best friends.

He said Joey’s father worked for NASA and had been transferred to Houston as Joey entered high school. The family moved there for a year before Joey’s father was transferred again to Kennedy Space Center. Back in Florida, Joey’s family returned to Merritt Island, but Joey attended a high school in Orlando trying to earn a college basketball scholarship.

Verpaele gave me Joey’s father’s cell phone number. I called and interviewed him, and he told me Joey was currently on the bus to the airport to take the VCU team to the Final Four. He asked if I wanted to speak with Joey and said he could include me on a three-way call with his son.

I thanked him and agreed to his offer and 15 minutes later I had finished interviewing Joey for an article appearing on the following day’s sports section front page.

By then it was 11 a.m. on Thursday morning and it had taken me just an hour to obtain the facts and quotes to put together a story that the other sportwriters were unable to.

What I learned from that experience is persistence truly does matter in journalism but so does knowing what resources to leverage when working on a tough story.

One of my former colleagues at that newspaper, the late Ernie Arico, gave me a nickname that has seemed to follow me ever since. He called me “The Master of Disaster” and would preface that by adapting a line from the introduction to the “A-Team” TV series. “If you have a problem, if no one else can help and if you can find him, maybe you can hire The Master of Disaster.” <