Coupeville Sports

    And then I went and got Jared Helmstadler (right) his L back. Small victories. (Kerry Rosenkranz photo)

I made a difference.

It’s a small thing, but it was annoying the heck out of me.

All spring, when you went to get Coupeville High School track results from athletic.net, there it was. Wolf freshman Jared Helmstadler’s last name was misspelled, with the ending listed as TER and not LER.

Making my annoyance greater, the Whidbey News-Times, not knowing him and not having covered CHS JV basketball, while sitting next to his grandmother and large extended family, used that incorrect spelling when they would list him in track stories.

Then, one day, I noticed you could correspond with the stats geeks that fuel athletic.net and ask for corrections. If you could provide proof, they might even listen to you.

And they did!

Just in time for the track season to end (but he’s got three years left), Jared Helmstadter became the Jared Helmstadler he was born to be.

My work here is done.

Now if I just could have convinced people to not use the non-existent hyphen in Madison Tisa McPhee’s last name. That also annoyed the heck out of me, and I know for a fact, having asked Mad Dawg herself, that it’s NOT THERE AND NEVER WAS.

OK, breathe in. Breathe out. Let it go…