Back when I was a junior in high school, a small weekly newspaper published my coverage of local sports teams — primarily basketball, track and field and baseball because I was also an athlete in those programs and was obviously at all of the games and meets.

The year was 1983 and it’s been 40 years now since those first stories were published. The writing was awful, I’ll admit, with a college education, internships and experience in the profession doing wonders in later years. But it was an exciting opportunity for a youngster with dreams of becoming a reporter.

As part of my sports writing jobs, I’ve written about hundreds of teams and thousands of athletes. In the early years, I pounded out stories on a typewriter, submitted them to the newspaper and they appeared in print. When I became part of an actual newsroom, the stories were written on VDTs — video display terminals. Then came the more advanced computer age from those early Radio Shack TRS-80 portable units that I used for road assignments to the blazing-fast Apple iMac desktop and MacBook Pro laptop that I work on today.

I mention these early years of my career because it was the beginning of a way of life — covering other people’s kids in sports. And it brings me the real point of what I’m writing about here in this blog.

One of the biggest regrets that I had as a sports writer was during my oldest son’s high school years. He played soccer and I missed a lot of opportunities to see him play. In fact, I missed...

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