George Sherling, 54, a database consultant and freelance writer who covered high school sports for the Chicago Tribune in McHenry County, the northwest suburbs and in small towns across Northern Illinois, died Wednesday, Jan. 24, of a heart attack in his Marengo home. A stringer for the Tribune since 1997, Mr. Sherling was among the paper’s most widely roaming and frequently used writers because of his eager volunteerism and detailed reporting. He attended three or four sports events a week, ranging from football games to swim meets. “He was an adventurer. He did things continually,” said his brother, Warren. An independent personality with a penchant for immersing himself in things that interested him, Mr. Sherling took extended trips to places like Samoa, New Zealand, and the Baja Peninsula. “I’m calling people from Nome, Alaska, that he met,” his brother said. The former editor-in-chief of Austin High School’s Austin Times, Mr. Sherling graduated as salutatorian of the high school in 1963. In the late-1960s, he received an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University followed by a master’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both degrees were in business-related computer fields. He taught business and computer courses at Chicago-area community colleges and the University of Missouri. He joined a new company in the 1970s that developed software for gas stations. He had been doing corporate consulting for the last six years, but Mr. Sherling had always enjoyed writing and had an abiding love of sports. Since the mid-1990s, he had combined both interests by covering high school sporting events for local newspapers, including the Tribune and, before that, the Daily Herald. For more than a decade, Mr. Sherling, who had diabetes, had been fighting a variety of related maladies. Besides his brother, Mr. Sherling had no other immediate survivors. A graveside service for Mr. Sherling will be held at noon Friday in Westlawn Cemetery, Montrose and Harlem Avenues, Chicago.
