All-area team complaints: How do you respond?

Rick, good luck to you.
On team size, I think it's important to have a first and second team if you're going over the number of players in a starting lineup (plus punter and kicker for football). Otherwise, one team will do, and put double the number in an honorable mention if you do one at all.
And tell any parent who thinks a newspaper honor helps determine scholarships that they haven't been paying attention for the previous four years.

 

This is the best way to handle it. Takes up the same space in the paper and serves the same function as an all-area team without having to risk making shaky editorial judgments. If you cover most or all games in your coverage area and you can make fair assessments, then go for it. But realistically, whatever biases that coaches have when they do all-district/conference/section/region/state votes are offset by their seeing a lot more games than your staff. And if the parents complain? Hey, take it up with the coaches -- we're not making the news, we're just reporting it.

 

I'm of a divided nature on All-Area/County/City teams. They're good in that they are very popular and are probably one of the most well-read parts of the section every year. The bad is all of the complaints, many baseless, from parents and sometimes coaches who are mortally offended that we didn't select Johnny or Jane Bumblescrew, who works really hard. I especially love it when they talk about how much harm we've done to their child for not making them all-county, or we're biased toward Humpthebunk High rather than Jackmioff High for picking Tom Shrivelwang over Mike Hunt.

As for putting the thing together, my staff and I get together, we compare notes after talking to the coaches and looking at the stats and we make a decision, for good or for ill. There are always tough decisions to be made, but if it were the all-everybody team, it'd defeat the purpose. I say one team, no first or second teams. Make some tough decisions. Back them up. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

 

I bet not. Sounds like you put everyone on a team.

 

No way I'm including one player from every school on a team. Can't justify adding a kid from an 0-10 team that got its brains beat out every week "just because." You want one scoop for everyone, there's baseball's all-star game.

One rule we have that's absolute for out POY: No ties. It's the easy way out of a hard decision. Break down everything from points and rebounds down to shoe size, you'll find something that separates one player from the rest.

 

Yeah, I try to keep in mind that the complaints from parents are irrational because they're not capable of being rational when it comes to their own kid ... although I'll quickly interject that my parents never -- simply never -- would have dreamed of doing anything like that. That's just not how they roll. But when these parents hit you with this overwrought hyperbole about how "devastated" the kid is, they're really talking about themselves. Most of the time, anyway.

Last fall I got a call from a girl who had made our first team in soccer in 2009, but she ended up on second team last fall. And she was clearly crying, asking for confirmation that she wasn't on first team. First and only time I've ever gotten a call from a kid about an all-area team. I was speechless after I hung up.

 

If a parent calls in and complains, I try to take most of what the say with a grain of salt. If it's an athlete, I think I'd put more stock into what they say over their parents.

 

Totally agree. One of our schools won one or two games in girls' basketball. Absolutely bombed every night by 67-15 scores. One of my writers, who is a poster on this board, asked if we would "throw them a bone" and give them one player.

I said we can do that when the team averages more points per game than our player of the year did. We'll be waiting for a while.

 

I respond if the complaint is based on stats. However, I had one parent call me a racist for putting his kid on the second team. The year before as a sophomore, he was a first-teamer at defensive lineman. However, he regressed in his junior year and the coach at his school's biggest rival told me, "Yeah, he wasn't as dominant as he was last year". That was enough for me, and I honored kids who had performed better that year on the first team, while sticking him on the second team.

Wasn't enough for the parent. Said Stanford was looking at him and anyone could see his talent, so it had to be racism. Didn't matter that nobody would know that his son was Native American from looking at him. I was part of the good old boys network trying to keep his son down. Wisely, I did not respond.

 

Wait, did RickStain really quit his job in all this and we rolled right past it?

 

For an attention-whore like me, that kinda hurt. Maybe I shoulda started my own thread.

 

Yes. You should. Or better yet, go back and grovel to your boss.