EDITORIAL: Go Flashes! Go Foxes! Go Whirlwinds!

Unbiased journalism is a standard in our business (even if it’s not always met) but permit us just a moment or two today, and this weekend, to be a homer.

You know the phrase. It refers to someone who roots openly for the home team.

Our sports staff will cover this weekend’s games objectively, but at Saturday’s South Carolina High School League championship games, we’ll be pulling for the local boys and girls.

In case you missed it, the Timmonsville High girls, the Johnsonville High boys and the boys team from Hartsville are all in the finals. They’ll square off against foes from the Upstate Saturday afternoon and evening in Columbia. The winners will be state champions.

To help get everyone into the spirit, handy (yet affordable) printed banners for Johnsonville and Timmonsville are included in today’s (Friday’s) Morning News. Our sister paper in Hartsville included a similar item in its Friday editions as well.

We did that to salute a remarkable achievement. Any team that reaches a state title game has accomplished something. Unless a squad enjoys an unusual advantage in talent that makes it so good it can win even when it doesn’t play its best, it’s difficult to get through a season and post-season without a critical slip. So we’d behind the local boys and girls just for that reason.

But all three Pee Dee teams who in this year’s title tilts offer especially compelling stories on their own.

Johnsonville, with hardly a player over six-feet tall, has never won a state title. The little school from southern Florence County can erase if it slays the figurative giants from Great Falls. Great Falls is coached by S.C. legend John Smith (no, that’s not an alias) who’s won a state record 868 games and been to 17 finals. That’s a tall order for the aptly named Flashes, but nothing they can’t handle.

Hartsville will be looking for its second state title … in the past 60 years. The Red Foxes won in 1952 and haven’t managed the feat again since.

Finally, there are the Timmonsville girls who were favored to win a title last year but flamed out before the championship round. This year’s team didn’t look like its ready for big things on paper. Heck, it’s doesn’t look big period. The Whirlwinds don’t have a tall team, don’t have senior on the roster, and needed a couple of 8th graders (at least one of whom is pretty good) just to field an eight-man team. They’d be everybody’s favorite underdogs … if they weren’t so darn good.

No matter about all that to us. They’re the home team and we’re behind them.

Go Whirlwinds. Go Flash. Go Foxes.

Bring home the bacon.

Don’t just observe Spay Day!

National Spay and Neuter Day was observed earlier this week, and about the only bad thing we can say about that is that a lot of people observe it every day.

Why is that bad? Because that’s all they do: observe it.

Some 3.5 million dogs and cats are euthanized in America every year, most because people considered them to be little more than surplus property.

The only real solution to that tragedy is the increaded – much increased —spaying and neutering of pets so as to cut down on unwanted litters.

Pet owners are responsible for that. Unfortunately, we observe that many of them just don’t seem to give … well, they don’t care. That’s unforgiveable, but it’s also reality. Unwanted pets, it seems, are like the poor.

They will always be with us.

Doesn’t have to be so. But it is.

Unsigned editorials represent the views of this newspaper. Editorial board members are:Mark Blum (regional publisher); Tucker Mitchell (regional editor), Kimberly Ginfrida (content manager), John Sweeney (political writer), Rebecca Ducker (multimedia editor) and David Johnson (regional circulation director).