One of the greatest things about my job as a sportswriter for the Lawrence Journal-World is the freedom that comes with it. Thanks to confident leadership and a competent staff, our sports department is pretty much a jack-of-all-trades operation. We have a sports editor with 30 years of experience under his belt who covers 8-man football and records junior high scores over the phone. On the flip side, we have part-timers who often are asked to cover some of the most exciting and noteworthy sporting events in town. The belief here is that we’re all good enough at what we do to handle anything thrown our way. My main job is to make sure we have the high school sports scene covered inside and out, but I’ve also been given the opportunity to chip in with our coverage of Kansas University football and basketball and have been happy to do it. Whatever helps make us the best we can be is fine with me. Thursday afternoon I experienced the extremes of what such a set-up can offer. After knocking out a preview story for tonight’s Lawrence High-Olathe Northwest district football game, I hopped into the car with a couple of colleagues and made my way over to Allen Fieldhouse for the KU men’s basketball team’s annual Media Day. Here, the players were made available to the media for about 30 minutes to answer questions ranging from what their expectations for the season were to what their biggest pet peeve was or who the best dancer on the team might be. After the rap session with the players, KU coach Bill Self held his first official press conference of the season, where he talked about his talented newcomers and the challenge of defending a national title with an almost entirely new roster. Self spoke for 30 minutes and then got back to his team. I listened for 30 minutes and then got back to my day. From the Fieldhouse I rushed over to Seabury Academy, where the Seahawks football team was playing its first home game in school history. From magnificent and tradition-rich Allen Fieldhouse to an 80-yard field lacking bleachers, goalposts and a scoreboard in 10 minutes. What a rush. At the Fieldhouse they had stacks of media guides and piles of notes that detailed anything and everything you could ever want to know about this year’s KU team. At the field, I couldn’t even locate a roster or a statistician. It hardly mattered. The Seahawks won their game, 30-12, and finished with a winning season. The smiles on the faces of the Seabury players, coaches and parents were just as bright as those on the faces of Cole Aldrich, Sherron Collins and Coach Self an hour earlier. It’s not every day a sportswriter can say that he went from the first press conference of the season for college basketball’s defending national champions to an 8-man high school football game outside of a tiny gym on the west edge of town. But in my world, such an adventure is a possibility every day. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.Still searching for Hidden Heroes_Have you seen someone go out of their way to help make the local high school sports scene click recently? Have a story about a super fan, a player or a devoted parent who has helped any of the local high school teams in some extraordinary way? We want to hear about it._Check out The Dividing Line’s Hidden Heroes blog and clue us in about the person you’ve seen who makes Lawrence’s high school sports scene spectacular.