A strange request from a coach...

What strategy? It's cross country, you RUN!

 

Yeah, the cross country parents and grandparents have been bad here.

Some of it stems from how poorly some of these meets have been conducted. We've had schools that will host meets, but not report any results. Coaches think the hosts are reporting the results, and so they don't call in. So, we're scrambling all night to track down coaches. Then, after we've done that, we'll get the calls the next day from people complaining because we didn't have one school's results.

The grandma of one of the local runners called up the other day and started bitching that we never interview her grandson (we did at the first meet we covered), we never run the state individual rankings (he's ranked, we've published them every week) and that we never cover Big Local High School, only the outlying areas. When I asked her if she wanted to come in and count stories and photos for this season, she hung up.

I love how these coaches think they're being so clever about holding out times or statistics. A few years ago we had a baseball coach from one of our fringe schools who never called in his stats for our weekly leaders list. He finally did it the last week of the year, and he said he didn't call us because he didn't want opposing teams knowing about his best players.

Then he started complaining because we did a feature on a local prep player who was one of the top hitters in the area. The coach said his top player had better numbers, and we should have done a story on him. My response was, "Well, if you would have been calling in your stats all year, we would have known that."

 

Nothing I love better than covering a cross country meet or a road race and waiting hours and hours for them to figure out the stats.

Could there a simpler sport than running that takes so damn long to get freakin' results together?

That's like covering a 1-0 soccer match and waiting for two hours until they figured out who scored and who got the assist.

 

Obviously a young, inexperienced coach who doesn't realize coaches talk to each other. There are no secrets.

I had a boys basketball coach like this some years back. Sharp, young guy, good strategist who knew how to utilize his talent. But he didn't call my paper because he didn't want opponents to know what was going on. A 25-year coaching veteran in the next district over in the same county, a nice guy, spent many an hour laughing with me on this.

 

XC coaches are all batshit insane in my coverage area. More weird shit goes down with XC coaches (and organizers) than all sports combined.

 

One of our local schools hosted a meet last year. Doesn't call or fax in results. We call the AD, no response. Get a hold of some of the coaches who were there, but not all.

Next morning, we get a fax from the school. Also get an e-mail from a pissed-off mom wondering why we didn't have her son's place or time. We told her the AD didn't fax the results in until that morning, and that her son's coach didn't respond to our message for results. Pissed-off mom called AD and coach and tore them a new one.

This year's meet, we got results from AD and coach by early evening.

 

The funny thing is, had the coach just not sent me anything on the meet, I probably wouldn't have even noticed and her sacred times would be safe ... it's not like I'm beating the bushes looking for cross country results every day (though for some of the big meets I'll make a few phone calls)... she and her assistant both showered me with emails about this particular event and how their team won.

 

Did a big regional a couple of years ago, the races gets run everything seems to be running smoothly. Then something hits, one Div. 2 team was given Div. 1 bib numbers and a Div. 1 team was given Div. 2 numbers. So despite knowing there was a problem, they continued with the awards and saying which teams advanced to states. By the time teams were sent home, they figured out the D2 team actually qualified for states. I wouldn't have liked to have been the person having to call from the school that was sent home thinking they were running another week. Of course, when I start asking questions about how something like that could happen (both the bib mix-up and announcing who qualified despite knowing of the problem) I get the whole the story shouldn't be about us, it's about the runners.

 

Had a batshit swimming coach try this once.

The times run, or the story doesn't. Her choice.

 

We've had swimming coaches deliberately not call in certain meets or call in altered times.

 

There is no news value -- none -- to stories on cross-country, swimming or track, without times.

No times, no coverage in the paper. Goodbye.

 

I have no idea why a coach would have problems with running cross country times. You just run.

In swimming, where kids can specialize in more than one stroke, it's understandable the coaches would rather not have the times run as it can change strategy for what kid you put in what event. Although the times should run, several years ago, we went from running top three times in every event to just winning times because too many coaches stopped reporting the top three times and just went with the winning times when reporting.