The thing about striving for perfection is nobody ever truly reaches it.

In one way or another, you’re going to fall short, as nothing is ever really perfect.

Sports have taught me that lesson over and over again, from my career running track and cross country, to covering sports for the various media publications—no matter what, something is going to happen that you couldn’t foresee.

I got a big dose of that lesson in the last week with arguably the worst mistake in my near-11 years as sports editor for the Times-Gazette.

During our annual basketball tabloid section, a series of oversights and ultimately a systemic failure on the production end led to one of the county teams being omitted from the special section.

The bad thing about print sections, once they’re out there, they’re out there, and mistakes can’t be mended once they’re caught after the plates hit the press.

The first editor I ever worked with in North Carolina taught me a valuable lesson about print mistakes. No matter what, there’s another paper coming out tomorrow.

While the next basketball tabloid won’t be printed until next February, we’re hard at work making sure the Shelbyville Central Golden Eaglettes get their due coverage.

I absolutely hate when mistakes are made in the sports section.

Luckily, we don’t have many, but from time-to-time, we do mess up.

At the end of the day, we’re human and are very prone to mistakes.

The only thing we can do is address the mistakes, install redundancies to limit future mistakes, and produce the best content we can for our community.

I love this community and I love working within the sports community in general.

I’ve worked hard to build great working relationships with the coaches across this county and beyond.

For the Eaglette basketball team, I want to issue a sincere apology for the omission in last week’s basketball tabloid.

This is not the standard of coverage we provide at the Times-Gazette.

We will be producing a special coverage of the Eaglettes in the Saturday, March 5 Times-Gazette.

Again, I absolutely hate when mistakes happen, especially glaring omissions like the one occurred in the basketball section and I offer my sincere apology to the team, coaches, fans and school.

Be sure to check out the weekend Times-Gazette for coverage on the Eaglettes’ season.

Chris Siers is sports editor of the Times-Gazette. Email him at sports@t-g.com.