Behind the Scenes Preparation

"It's not the legs that get you there, it's the heart that propels them." - Jack Falla

I am currently watching something incredible. A couple of members of our stats crew, Zena Davila, the leader of the pack, and Rachel Reida, who has been promoted from stat-runner to manual to secondary to jack-of-all trade for VERSUS (and is now learning how to do primary stats) as the season has progressed, are practicing inputing stats. Please note the time stamp on this post. Yes, it's about 10:30 p.m. on a Thursday night, more than a week before the Vipers' next home game, and these two young women are working hard to perfect their craft.

It's a side job for each of them. They have their own 8-5 jobs. Zena's hours extend a bit beyond 5 and Rachel's got other side-stuff she does too. Yet here they are, in their not so abundant free time, practicing and learning.

They're practicing on a New Orleans @ Milwaukee game from 2008. I would imagine they're both tired, but they're only at the end of the third quarter, so plenty of time left working.

This is the kind of behind the scenes preparation that will make them both successful and also make them both more attractive to future employers should it be necessary. It's always a tough trick to get prospective employers to realize what kind of behind the scenes stuff you do, you know, the stuff no one generally knows about and you're too modest to talk about?

Well, if anyone out there reading this is looking to hire either of them and just googled their names and found this blog post, they have my full endorsement.