On the best day of my career, I told Mike McCarthy, the basketball coach at Georgetown Visitation Prep School, that his 17-year-old do-it-all shooting guard was going to be an “All-Met.”

The Washington Post chose the storied “All-Metropolitan” teams in the spring, fall and winter for the better part of a century. I made the selections for two years. I spent a minimum of four nights a week at high school sports games and practices, half the time not even for a story, only to evaluate players for All-Met picks.

Our selection meetings were cloaked in secrecy in one of The Post’s windowless conference rooms. At photoshoots, editors considered asking athletes to surrender their phones at the door. That wasn’t going to happen with a group of high schoolers.

Maeve Carroll had led Visitation, a small, all-girls school without much athletic pedigree, to an 11th straight conference title in the 2016-17 season. She was off to college to play for the University of Maine. McCarthy could hardly believe she’d be an All-Met.

“Our Maeve?” he gasped over the phone. “Our Maeve Carroll?”

The Washington Post eliminated its Sports desk this week, and with it, the high school sports section and All-Met teams.

A high school football coach called me on Wednesday in disbelief at the news. A prominent high school’s social media account DM’d me asking if they could help me and my colleagues — more than 300 of whom were laid off as part of The Post’s draconian cost-cutting.

All I could do was apologize.

The All-Met teams were part of a covenant with our readers and the communities we covered. Choosing the teams was a demonstration of how Post journalists got out into the community. It was not uncommon for the parent of a star quarterback to tell me an offensive lineman protecting their son should be an All-Met selection.

It wasn’t uncommon for teammates to send me game film of their friends to nudge me in their direction. After a tough loss, a coach might say to me, “We couldn’t handle their power forward all night. He should be an All-Met.”

The Post produced print and online special sections for the All-Met teams, staging photoshoots at RFK Stadium or a local photo studio. The legendary Marvin Joseph — who’s done portrait sessions with the likes of Ava DuVernay, Meryl Streep, George Clooney and other pop culture luminaries — photographed our athletes during my years.

In Maeve’s season, he told honorees to ditch their uniforms for streetwear. He put our wrestler of the year in his singlet — and dark wash jeans. Our boys’ basketball player of the year, Chris Lykes, wore Vans and designer jeans, then tilted away from the camera so his sleeve of tattoos would pop in the flash. Another basketball player wore a black puffer jacket over his bright yellow penny. Marvin shot another as he pulled a designer hoodie up over his head.

The kids crowded around his monitor between takes. Parents snapped photos behind Marvin, who would take a kid’s phone, plug it into a speaker and tell them to pick the music. We had a blast. Athletic directors and booster club presidents would email to ask how they could purchase extra print editions.

“Can we buy it from you framed?” one athletic director asked me, when I was 22 years old. I think I told him to try taking a copy to Bed Bath & Beyond.

In the years before I arrived, The Post hosted a luncheon for the All-Met honorees the day the paper was released. That was also a victim of cost cutting. I’m told it was like a networking event for the athletes. The football players met the soccer players who met the swimmers who met the lacrosse players who met the cross-country runners.

All-Met alumni are everywhere. Maeve played basketball overseas and now works for the NBA. Lykes still plays overseas, as does Aisha Shepherd, the girls’ basketball player of the year for 2016-17. Another All-Met from that season now works in substance abuse recovery. Another works in medicine. I saw on social media that one was engaged to be married.

All-Mets also trained legions of journalists. I started at The Post putting these teams together; I’m now a White House correspondent. Jesse Dougherty, my old beat partner, is the leading sports business reporter in the country (and was just inexplicably laid off).

Chelsea Janes (also stunningly laid off), one of the most lyrical and incisive baseball writers in America, covered high school sports. James Wagner is now an international correspondent for the New York Times. Paul Tenorio is a senior soccer correspondent for The Athletic. Camille Powell Kilgore leads The Post’s professional development initiatives.

Eli Saslow of the New York Times is the premier narrative feature writer in American newspaper journalism. He’s a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He began his career covering high school sports for The Post in 2004.

Covering high school sports was an essential training ground for me and so many others, sending young, impressionable journalists deep into the communities they covered. You met the kids, the parents, the teachers, the guidance counselors and the principals.

You covered the games and put together the All-Met teams. But you wrote profiles and investigations, too. When I was on the beat, I revealed sexual harassment within a girls’ basketball team and an attempted cover-up. I wrote about a pitcher whose birth defect gave him a devastating curveball. I spoke with athletes confronting racism, sexism, poverty, injury and all manner of challenges.

During my call with McCarthy from Visitation, he told me he wanted to get Maeve’s parents in the room when I called and told her the news. Maybe he’d tell them to get to the school after practice, so when I called, the whole team could be on speakerphone, too.

I don’t recall my conversation with Maeve. I remember her to be bright, kind, a consummate teammate, irrepressibly aggressive on the court, yet never out of control. I remember telling McCarthy that these calls would be the best, the most joyful, I would ever make in my career.

The D.C. region has been robbed of that now, and deprived of one of the most genuine touch points between journalists from its flagship newspaper and the people who call themselves Washingtonians.

I do hope others will pick up this torch, not just because our region deserves it, but because journalism — which is hemorrhaging trust — needs more jobs like this. People need to see journalists in their communities and need opportunities to participate in our work.

I sometimes say that in my world, it’s like high school never ends, because the skills and values I learned (and some of the sources I made) doing All-Mets will always travel with me. That was part of the investment The Post made in me when it hired me for that role. I wish others could have the same opportunity.

As always, please keep in touch. Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.