We're Talking Sports Ep. 5 - Raymond Suarez

**Will** (0:46)
All right, welcome, everybody. Welcome to episode number five of We're Talking Sports with Will and Ron. And here is the aforementioned Mr. Ron. How are you, buddy?

**Ron** (0:57)
Hey, good morning. Glad to be here.

**Will** (0:59)
Yeah, long time no see.

**Ron** (1:00)
Yeah, right?

**Will** (1:02)
Something seems the same yet different than just a little bit earlier.

**Ron** (1:06)
Switch chairs, right? Yeah.

**Will** (1:08)
Awesome, man. So why don't you introduce our guest today, man? This guy is a really cool dude with a cool beard.

**Ron** (1:16)
He is. He is. So I've known him all of his life because he's a little bit younger than me.
But yeah, Raymond Suarez, and he does Sports Information at Pima Community College. Welcome.

**Raymond Suarez** (1:30)
Good morning, guys. Thank you. Thank you much for having me.

**Will** (1:32)
Oh, man. It's a pleasure being here. Well, first, I guess we should mention, yesterday I posted we had a different guest coming in. Unfortunately for us, Manny Gomez from Integrity Auto and the Choya High School football coach.
He got busy at the office. He's got to take care of his customers, so we couldn't be here today. But we definitely thank you, Raymond, for pinch hitting.

**Raymond Suarez** (2:00)
Absolutely.

**Will** (2:01)
Yeah, we really appreciate it, man. So tell us a little bit about what you do over at Pima.

**Raymond Suarez** (2:06)
So I'm in the Sports Information Department at Pima Community College. I've been there for 14 years. So I write about all the sports at Pima and just write up recaps on all the game results and post on their... I run their social media pages on Pima Athletics, on X, Facebook and Instagram. So I post all my recaps on there. I create graphics to promote the upcoming games when... You know, the morning of the games and just also do some marketing for the Athletics department. So I got my hand in a little bit of everything.

**Will** (2:45)
Well, that's cool. And how did you get into this?

**Raymond Suarez** (2:48)
So I was a major... I majored in journalism and actually worked for the Tucson Citizen the last six years before it closed and then worked for the Arizona Daily Star for two and a half years. And just randomly, someone who I worked with at the Tucson Citizen, his name was Paul Schwalbach. He was a copy editor and we had maybe talked, you know, no more than five times in the six years that I worked at the Citizen. And he just out of the blue just gave me a call one day and said, hey, I think you'd be really good at this job at Pima. And so let me put you in touch with Edgar Soto, the athletic director at the time. And we maybe talked about 15, 20 minutes. And he goes, you want the job? Say, yes, sir.
Okay, there we go.

**Will** (3:40)
That's awesome.

**Raymond Suarez** (3:41)
Just hit the ground running since then.

**Will** (3:43)
That is.

**Ron** (3:43)
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And you worked with Steve Rivera over there at the paper then, right?

**Raymond Suarez** (3:49)
Yeah. Yeah. But I maybe saw him less time than I saw Paul.

**Ron** (3:53)
Really?

**Raymond Suarez** (3:55)
I knew where his desk was.

**Ron** (3:56)
So, okay.

**Will** (3:58)
All right. Yeah. So you're just talking off air right now that you just got back from the girls softball. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that. How that went.

**Raymond Suarez** (4:07)
It was a lot of fun. I mean, you know, of course, we wish the, you know, the outcome would have been different for the girls. Yeah.
But it was a great time out there. You know, a couple of the girls had never been on a flight before. Oh, wow.

**Will** (4:21)
So tell us where you went.

**Raymond Suarez** (4:22)
We went to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

**Will** (4:26)
Okay. So a flight.

**Raymond Suarez** (4:27)
Yeah. So we flew from Tucson to Atlanta and then had to rush to our flight to get to Charlotte. And then Charlotte was maybe about an hour, 15-minute drive to Spartanburg.
So I had fun telling the girls, it's like, wow, we hit four states in one trip.

**Will** (4:47)
Right?

**Raymond Suarez** (4:47)
Yeah.

**Will** (4:49)
Check, check.

**Ron** (4:50)
Yeah.

**Raymond Suarez** (4:53)
So we got there a couple of days early. We had a pre-tournament banquet. And then we went to a single A game.
They were the single A affiliate of the Texas Rangers, the Hub City Spartanburgers.

**Will** (5:09)
Nice.

**Raymond Suarez** (5:11)
So I got a I got a refrigerator magnet from the game.