When I transferred to Millersville University in the Fall of 2006, I still had a lot to learn. Through numerous classes and personal experiences, I have come a long way in the past two and a half years. One thing that I learned that I still don’t quite understand is that, for some reason, people really dislike The Snapper.
I joined The Snapper at the beginning of my first semester as a writer. After having problems adjusting to my new life away from home and other personal issues, I decided to take the rest of the semester off from writing. The next semester I was ready to go once again to gain some experience to start my path towards a career in sports writing.
This experience instantly became one in which I knew I would never regret as I made my way up The Snapper food chain. Staff writer turned into associate sports editor, which eventually became sports editor. As hard as the experience was every week, there was no way I was ever going to quit. Too many people relied on me, and I had too many friends in the office that I would have let down.
I also never would have forgiven myself if I gave up. It crossed my mind on some nights when writers failed to send me stories and I had a quarter page of blank space set aside for that person’s article, or other times when the Spinning Rainbow Pinwheel of Death on the Mac at my desk never stopped spinning and my computer froze after I had not saved my layout for over an hour. This experience guaranteed that I would never start smoking cigarettes; if the stress of The Snapper did not drive me to the habit, nothing ever will.
Throughout my years at Millersville and numerous hours at The Snapper office, my friends and family all knew how much time and effort producing the sports section of the paper took and how proud I was every week of the result. However, many students at Millersville either did not ever recognize this or did not seem to care.
I became accustomed to the fact that it is somewhat trendy at Millersville to dislike The Snapper. We are well aware that there are certain student organizations that are anti-Snapper. Some even take it as far as to create Facebook groups professing their distain towards our publication and obsessing over every little thing The Snapper does.
So I decided to let you in on some things you may not know about The Snapper. As I write this now on a Tuesday night at 10 p.m., there are about 15 people in this office hard at work trying to produce one final issue of this newspaper, many of whom think that 10 p.m. is early and will not be leaving the office until at least 2 a.m. (and this is a generous estimation). While we do have a faculty advisor, the people who produce 20 issues of
The Snapper annually for Millersville are students, from the writers to the editors, from the advertising manager to the Webmaster, from the copy editors to and everyone else. And these people don’t get paid for this, and don’t get credit for doing it either. They are all volunteers who don’t have to put in the hours that they do. And it is every single one of them that work as a team to bring the best publication we can to Millersville students, whether they care or not.
The people who work for The Snapper have become some of my closest friends at Millersville. To single out or thank anyone individually would take away from all of the hard work that every single person I have ever worked with in this office has done during my stay here at Millersville.
As I now prepare to graduate, I hope that students in the future can appreciate the work that the future staff of The Snapper does. They are here for you. And rather than criticize and making it a hobby to find all of the mistakes you can in The Snapper, come down and help out. If you feel like that would take up a lot of your free time, now you know how we feel.
Goodbye to the Snapper staff. I’ll always appreciate all of the hard work you do, even when it feels like no one else does.
Goodbye Millersville. If nothing else, you’ve taught me to have a thick skin.
Zack is graduating with a major in English and a minor Print Media Studies.
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