Rich Fisher has been covering all different sports for the past 44 years of his life.
From baseball to basketball, golf to swimming, and even from skiing to horse racing, if there is a sport that you can think of, odds are Fisher has written a story on it. While he has written stories at all different levels of sports in the past, it is high school sports where Fisher has made his mark as a writer.
On April 5, Fisher, or Fish, as he is known by everyone who has met him after his elementary school days, will be inducted in the Steinert High School Athletic Hall of Fame as a special contributor, adding another honor to his long list of accomplishments as a sports writer. However, for Fisher, this accomplishment just means a little more.
“When I got the phone call, I was beyond belief, I was so excited,” Fisher said. “There are so many people in that hall of fame that when I was a kid I idolized. Steinert has had such a great athletic tradition over the years. It’s a great honor.”
Fisher, a class of 1976 graduate from Steinert, earned his first byline writing for the Steinert Spectrum during his senior year of high school. It was at Steinert, the school that will be honoring his career, where he first found his love for journalism.
Fisher was always a big sports fan growing up, and according to his fourth grade teacher, he always had the ability to write. After encouragement from a teacher at Steinert, Fisher decided to give the journalism route a go, studying it at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and never looking back after that.
Over the years, Fisher has covered many different sporting events in the area: Rutgers sports, Princeton sports, Giants game, you name it. However, high school sports have been his forte, and it has been in the Mercer County area where he grew up where he has spent most of his career.
“I enjoy it,” Fisher said. “The high school kids appreciate that you’re there.” He also then compared the interviews to interviews with professional and collegiate athletes, and said that it is much nicer to be dealing with the athletes one-on-one and on a more personal level rather than being “one in a million” reporters trying to get a question in with a professional.
The love between Fisher and the high school sports he covers does not just go one way, though.
“His approval rating is like 100%,” Charlie Inverso, the former head coach of both Rider University and Mercer County Community College’s men’s soccer teams, said. “You never hear anyone say he’s a bad writer, and it’s very unique that everyone likes your pieces in an industry where you’re not always looking to make friends.”
If there is one thing Fisher has done in his career, it is make friends. Whether it be coaches, former players, or even refs, Fisher always stays in touch with the people that he has covered and is friendly with, giving him the reputation of being a very social guy.
John Wagner, a retired coach, teacher and athletic director at Hightstown High School, told a story of a “Christmas Eve Club,” which started as a small event for a handful of about five or six teachers and coaches to wish each other happy holidays. “One year fairly early on, we invited Fish,” Wagner said. “It’s been going on ever since then, but it’s close to 40 people that come now. He’s responsible for most that come. It’s a standing joke that it was a small gathering until Fish joined.”
“Fish loves people and people love Fish,” Inverso said. “The place will be packed [for his hall of fame induction] and Fish will get a standing ovation.”
To last in an industry as long as he has and be celebrated the way he has been, there has to be more at play than just friendliness and kindness. For Fisher, his work ethic and his creative ability as a writer have helped to prolong his career.
“He wrote a weekly ski column even though he’s never touched a ski in his life,” Wagner said. “All the travel he’s done is a credit to his work ethic.”
For Fisher, having any sort of work ethic is the bare minimum to make it as a journalist.
“If you work hard, people respect what you do,” Fisher said. “These coaches put a lot of time into their craft. They don’t want some guy coming up not paying attention to things, they want a guy that knows what’s going on. I try to know what’s going on.”
Fisher guesses that he has had in the “high, high thousands” of articles published during his career. After spending 44 years working for weekly paper the Princeton Packet, where he would write seven or eight stories a week, running his own website, fish4scores.com, where he would write five, six or seven stories in a day, and freelancing, it makes sense that Fisher’s byline count would be way up there.
Being able to write an interesting story and keeping people intrigued while reading is a necessity for a journalist. For Fisher, it’s one of his strong suits.
“He’s an amazingly creative mind, his stories always have a flow,” Inverso said. “He’s really good at finding parallels from something that happened in a game to something else. He doesn’t repeat too many things.”
“Sometimes he’d sneak a zinger in that only I would know about,” said Joe Fink, a high school classmate of Fisher’s and retired coach of Trenton High School’s boy’s soccer team. “His articles about our team were always positive. He’s a very positive guy.”
For Fisher, constant positivity is one of the basics when it comes to covering high school sports.
“They’re high school kids, it may be the only time they get mentioned in a story,” Fisher said. “You want to give them something to enjoy.”
The fact that he may be the only person covering an athlete in their life, or the “singular documenter” as he called it, is something that Fisher values in his writing.
“He values that parents may put his story into a frame and it becomes a family keepsake,” Inverso said. “You can’t put a price tag on that, and it’s why Fish is a Mercer County area icon.”
“I like to write about these kids as more than athletes,” Fisher said. “I like to present these athletes as a complete person rather than just a kid running around playing sports.”
The decision to induct Fisher into Steinert’s Hall of Fame was an easy one for the committee to make, as they unanimously voted him in. With his body of work as a journalist covering Steinert and other high school’s sporting events around the area, it was going to be hard to keep him out.
“His resume speaks for itself,” said Mary Ann Tarr, a retired journalist and current co-chair of the Steinert High School Athletic Hall of Fame committee. “He’s versatile. You could send him to a chicken dinner at your church, and he would come back with a good story.”
Now 66 years old, Fisher is still regularly covering Mercer County high school sports. While he did say that it gets harder to do this work as he gets older, he still really enjoys getting out and watching these games that he’s covering.
“The people that are involved really make it great,” Fisher said. “They make my job easier, they sit for interviews when they maybe don’t feel like it. I owe them.”
Tarr, on the other hand, believed that his ability to interview is part of what makes him a great reporter. “You can just see people relax when he starts to interview. He’s just so comfortable with it.”
Fisher will enter a 2025 Steinert Hall of Fame class with nine other people and two teams.
Fink, a Steinert Hall of Fame inductee in 2014, said: “He’s the kind of guy you could call for a favor and he’d be over in a minute. He’s someone you can always count on.”
