End of season awards

Try this. Make a list of all of your players, coaches and maybe even stranger parents. Make an empty folder on your hard drive. Use your web browser to find pictures of cartoon characters. Looking at the list of people, and the lists of cartoon characters, you'll soon see matches.

Almost every team has a real stud. That's the picture of the Superman. The fast kid is usually the Flash, Speedy Gonzales or the Road Runner. The muscle can be the Hulk. The good kid who tries hard but just makes silly mistakes can be Baby Huey. The wise guy can be Bugs Bunny. The parent or coach who flies off the handle can be Yosemite Sam. I think you get he picture here.

When you find a picture you like on the web, put the mouse cursor over it and right click it. Then save the picture to the folder you made. Then comes the fun part. Just open a new word processor document and save it in the folder with the pictures. Now write a short paragraph or two on each person on the list, making sure you point out why you chose that character and maybe a story about each too.

When you're done, insert the picture for each person into their little write up. In Word, you can use the "Text Wrapping" feature to change the picture so it can be behind the typing, alongside or anywhere else. By clicking on the picture once, you can resize or reshape it to whatever you want. If you really want a neat document, get a picture of each of the people and put it in too. You should be able to find someone with a digital camera to help you do that.

Depending on your writing skills and your gift of gab, you should be able to make something really neat in a fairly short period of time. Unless you get carried away with the size of the pictures and the writing, you should end up with about 4-6 pages and you can print that yourself on decent printer or even have Kinko's do it without draining the ol' bank account.

I usually go a bit overboard on things like that, but what I like to do for a finale` is to just write a short story about the team and the season. But instead of using names, I use little thumbnail pictures of the cartoon characters.

I know that sounds like a lot of work, but I can assure you it really isn't, and you'll be giving the kids something that will bring back memories like looking at an old HS year book. Its also something that will more likely be save into their later years than a trophy or a certificate. It will bring back memories.