Four teams from Frederick County advanced to the state baseball tournament, a first.

Two softball and two boys lacrosse teams also reached the state tournament.

We have high school athletes taking part in the state track meet and the state tennis tournaments over the weekend, too.

That's a lot of kids and a lot of teams in state competition for the county.

When I started here in May 1967, we didn't send any teams to the state baseball tournament because there was no such thing. There were no softball or lacrosse teams in the county.

In the fall, you had football (at Thomas Johnson and Frederick ) and boys soccer. There was boys basketball in the winter and baseball, track and, if I recall, tennis. There were eight county public high schools -- Frederick , TJ, Middletown , Walkersville , Thurmont , Emmitsburg , Brunswick and Linganore . TJ and Linganore had only recently opened.

The schools were concerned only with boys sports. Girls high school sports were considered a stepchild. They were played in the afternoon and got very little recognition. It wasn't until the 1970s that girls sports began to receive the same treatment as boys.

The Frederick News-Post's sports staff in those days was one person, the sports editor. He attended events, then came back to the paper to write the story and put the pages together. Because there were so few teams, he had little trouble completing the tasks alone.

(In 1969, I covered several World Series games in Baltimore and then came back and put the paper together. That's when they had day World Series games, a thing of the past.)

We also dealt with typewriters and hot type, but that's another story.

Today, the sports staff consists of five people and about four stringers (writers who are paid by the story). With all the sports teams in the county these days, we need that many people.

Last week, we had so many regional games going on in so many different sports that we couldn't cover everything. We just had to pick what we thought were the best games to cover.

When I realized how many teams had advanced to the state tournament this week, I was a little worried that we couldn't cover everything. Six state semifinal softball and baseball games were scheduled on Tuesday alone. But some of our stringers became available, so we were able to send writers to all the events, even though only one, the Class 1A baseball semifinals, was held in Frederick County.

The biggest problem is that many of the events were held at night and we had to rush to complete the stories.

Forty-two years ago, I never could have imagined that we would have so many teams playing in state competition and that we would be able to cover so many different events.

Times have certainly changed.