Dear dimwit on the phone

I'd be in favor of Saturday's at noon. Think of how easy Friday and Saturday nights would be!!!

 

Saturday afternoon Ohio State football games pretty much mean there'd be no crowd ... or officials, or chain gang, or PA guys, or coaches, or players.
All kidding aside, it would be great as far as deadline and the school district not having to pay for the stadium lights, but it's just not an option.

 

I covered a Saturday afternoon high school game last year after a hurricane came through the Thursday night before and dumped a bunch of rain on the area. It's an experience I'd rather not repeat. It was hotter 'n hell, and even though I had sunscreen on, I still got burned because I sweated most of it off.

 

A generation ago, Saturday afternoon football was pretty widespread in my neck of the woods. Roughly half the high schools in the PA coal region where I worked, didn't have lights in the stadium. That gradually changed and pretty much everyone does now.

It wasn't unheard of for Saturday kickoff times to be changed because Penn State was playing at noon or 3:30. Once had a game moved to a different school that had lights because the principal had season tickets and didn't want to miss either game.

 

One time we had someone complain about our lack of NFL Sunday game coverage when the preseason just ended on Thursday.

Recently some old guy said he was going to cancel his subscription because apparently these new sports TV stations he's never heard of before are some sort of newspaper conspiracy to get him to spend more money.

 

This has to be a first. Anyone getting complaints that the America's Cup is getting less coverage than NFL and college football?

 

Never had that, but in San Diego years ago, our agate clerk got a call from a lady who was complaining about the lack of coverage of the NCAA wrestling championships (we were putting it in agate and maybe a brief). She kept insisting to our clerk that there was more interest in that than the NCAA basketball tournament, which was going on at the same time.

 

Couple of years ago a guy on the message board (who had long complained that his son was getting the coverage he deserved while playing quarterback for a mediocre high school team) made a post about our lack of high school baseball coverage.
In July.
I created an account specifically to reply to him and wrote a long, thoughtful post detailing why he was not only dead wrong, but also an idiot. Like most angry callers, he backed down pretty quickly with the, "Oh, you guys do a great job and we appreciate it" line.
Asshat.

 

The way to make America's Cup more interesting is to give each boat a cannon. Each gets two shots per race. Sink the other boat, win the race.

Also, all crew members must wear an eye patch.

 

Note more than 10-15 years ago in Connecticut, we had Friday night games at 7, then a couple of local teams hosting 10 a.m. games, plus the 1 p.m. games.

Three games in under 24 hours. It rocked, and you got to see kids multiple times.

 

Hey now..... 20 or more years ago, I did a feature on a sailor on an America's Cup team. Dude was a pretty interesting guy and the story got some nice feedback. That, sadly, is the extent of my America's Cup journalism experience.

 

Saturday football preps..... from a newspaper standpoint, I hated it because our Sunday sections were normally pretty packed and it just forced me as a desk editor to cut back on other stuff to get in another prep game. That seemed to happen much more often in the playoffs in November, so, thankfully baseball season was over by then.

I remember years ago hoping and praying that certain Class B powerhouse was going to lose in the state semifinals, thus avoiding the uncomfortable situation of having them play the state championship game on the same day as Major State U faced off against its big in-state rival (as well as local NAIA football team in the playoffs). As a desk editor, I like to play up the big events and that would have been an unfortunate situation. Thankfully, they lost.