The Pilot's high school sports staff is suffering a big loss this week.

We're losing Darrell Cuenca, who on Monday will be starting a new job as a reporter at a group of newspapers in Delaware.

Guys like Darrell are the backbone of our high school sports operation. The front men, the guys who get the vast majority of the bylines -- and they all do outstanding jobs -- are familar names such as Larry Rubama and Jami Frankenberry and Lee Tolliver and more recently Rainer Sabin.

But like so many job situations, it's the guys behind the scenes who are so incredibly valuable to those who are front and center on stage.

Darrell has been one of those behind-the-scenes guys for us since 2004. Mike Keech is another such guy. So is Jason Kidd. We couldn't survive without guys like Darrell and Mike and Jason, and all the work that they do on a daily basis.

But we're losing Darrell after he completes his shift Saturday. Most readers don't see Darrell's byline much because his main job is, to use our terminology, ''working the phones'' five nights a week. Without a guy like Darrell doing what he does, all those results that appear in the paper and online wouldn't be in either place. Without a guy like Darrell, those roundups that highlight 10 or 12 or so of the day's most noteworthy high school events wouldn't get done. Without a guy like Darrell, we don't have a schedule of high school events appearing in the paper every day. Darrell has been the guy who has compiled the high school schedules for us the past couple of years. Thankless, monumental tasks like that don't get done by magic.

It's long, hard, tedious work.

There's so very much that a guy like Darrell does that the average reader who follows high school sports doesn't realize.

It's a huge loss for us. Over the past several years, Darrell also has become our resident expert on boys soccer. So we're losing our boys soccer beat writer. He also has been responsible for boys and girls lacrosse coverage. And he has become an important part of our football coverage.

We're going to miss him a ton.