Letter from the Editor: Heat Vision and the annual Summer Guide issue

Courtesy of the U.S. State Department

Welcome, dear reader, to the annual Summer Guide Issue of The Pitch. This year, as every year, we’re here to give you the jump on how to beat the heat… by spending as much time in the sun as possible…? Hm, that can’t be right. Will circle back on that.

We do have a thick issue here, full of a few hundred of the most exciting events swinging through the extended metro area between now and September. Or whenever it is that summer decides to end. Spring has pulled its traditional near-non-existence, while winter made a last gasp effort in April, that then bled all over the start of tornado season. Hopefully with its temper tantrum out of the way, we’ll have a nice miserably humid, scorching hot couple of months. Y’know, normal midwest summer—a cruel summer that we’ve all adapted to thrive in (or against).

In putting together this issue’s diverse set of stories, we wanted to look at people and activities that are actively pushing themselves to tackle physically challenging situations, Herculean efforts, and (in one case) the devilish decision to create a devastating hot sauce line using digital dissemination. For those of us stuck behind a laptop each day at work, and gazing endlessly into the void of our phones in the evening, we found it energizing to just dip our sedentary toes into the worlds of local folks who are finding their happiest selves by sweating it all out.
These narratives gave me a kick in the pants that threw me back to my early school years; A time when the shift from 9 months of education to 3 months of adventure was a sudden, shocking inversion of my entire existence.

I was always an ‘inside kid’ at heart, but unfortunately paired with a body that the ‘outside kids’ really needed on their sports teams. [It’s hard to lock yourself away from the world to play Command & Conquer on your PC when you’re 6’7” in the 4th Grade. Turns out a lot of basketball coaches in central Kansas will simply, not let you go to waste.]

Courtesy of the U.S. State Department

My competitive summers grew more intense in middle school and high school. Anyone who played football can probably remember that switch-over, when summer no longer meant total freedom, and instead meant three-a-day practices, drenched in sweat, broken down, and harboring a near homicidal inclination towards your coach’s whistle.

As much as I did love the whole pantheon of in-your-face ball toss-about events with my friends, I do remember the brutality of practice combined with hours spent at a part-time job, and how it gave me a new perspective: I, for the first time, really missed school. Classrooms with A.C. and learning songs for a musical and generally fuckin-about on the early internet.

That summer heat, that flip of your world, is still what makes the season so important to me. My entire life doesn’t change, but even encroaching on 40 years old it still serves as smashing a reset button, and tweaking the way I look at my life, my world, and what brings me joy.

Just ahead of this Summer Issue going to press, the US Dept. of State brought a cadre of journalists to The Pitch offices. This delegation of investigative reporters came from places like Croatia, Albania, Ghana, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, and more. They spent the day with us, learning all about how we handle journalism, reporting, ethics, advertising, and giving back to our community. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was a huge honor to be considered an outlet worth traveling the world to pick our brains.

As we moved into taking questions from the foreign correspondents, their reactions to the situations we face here were distressingly familiar, from how bad things can get in their home countries, to shock regarding the uphill battles that we, as a city and a country, are currently up against. Concepts like the recent stadium tax debate, the reasons why KC doesn’t have local control over their own police department. Or how we exist between two states with wildly different laws—There was just a laundry list of conflicts from where we live that seemed incomprehensible to some of these seasoned journalists, and that includes a few who cover wars or live in countries we’d probably classify as “oppressive regimes.”

On their way out the door, we snapped a group photo, and then the entire team descended on our piles of recent Pitch magazines, grabbing dozens to take home with them. I won’t forget that moment anytime soon. They were so fascinated by how we write, how we sweat it out to get the stories we get, and the entire experience left us energized. Our summer started with a jarring moment that reminded us of what a small perspective shift can do to reorient your entire life and its purpose.

We’re excited to get back out there and push ourselves in the journalistic equivalent of two-a-day, to fight, to go harder and stronger against whatever heat we face. Here’s hoping that this issue spreads some magic dust rededication into your world.

Pitch in, and we’ll make it through,