All-Sports awards

Any of you do any kind of All-Sports awards for your local coverage area ? Curious how you handle the individual sports like track, swimming, golf, tennis, cross country, etc...?

Example
1. Joe Smith High 545 points
2. Apple Valley 525

 

Yeah - it's not like you need to give parents more of a reason to call and complain.

 

Maybe your confused what im asking, not individual awards but teams awards.

http://varsity.orlandosentinel.com/os-hs-varsity-cup-0608-20100607,0,5075769.story

 

I get it - like the Sears Cup, or whatever. Trouble is - when the thing is decided, the parents don't care what formula was used to determine which school had the better year, or that it was devised before the season began - they're going to wonder why a team's upset win for a division championship isn't worth more than a favorite winning a division.
Figure the individual sports you can just award points based on how the team did at regionals. But still, this sounds like a bigger headache than it is worth - unless you have it sponsored by a big advertiser.

and don't forget academics, cheerleading, band, Model UN...

 

I've done it. I calculate state tournament qualification percentage (in other words, school A had 5/8 teams qualify, school B 4, etc) and state tourney winning percentage and compare then both by school and by sports. So School B had the most state tourney wins, and say, baseball in our area did very well at the state level and basketball went 2-6.

It's interesting to a degree. It's also filler when the spring school sport season ends. There's no Cup or award or anything else and it's all factual and straight math so I don't get much for complaints.

 

Clarion-Ledger does one for all the high schools in Mississippi (well, all the MHSAA school). It's strictly based on playoffs and how well a school does in each sport. You get x number of points for making the playoffs, and an increasing number for advancing at each round, up to a max of 30 for winning a state championship.

It's about as fair as you can get for one of these things, but in the smaller classes, it's weighted in favor of the richer (read, parochial) schools that have the resources to field championship caliber teams in sports like golf, tennis and soccer.

 

We do this at our paper, too, though I tweaked the system a little when I took over. We give points for district titles and runners-up and then bonus points depending on how far you advance. We also give points if there is a county tournament in sports like golf, tennis, etc. Then I made it really hard on myself and awarded points for individual state champions. My reasoning was if Podunk South has a terrible track team, but also has the top sprinter in the state who wins the 100 meters, the school should get some points for his title.

Makes for a little extra work, sure, but I feel like it's worth it. A few of our schools get pretty competitive about trying to win it.

 

Or you can follow the Washington Post, put out your All-Sports list and the formula used to determine said list.Then rank the schools by how much and how often parents of the schools listed complain about the rankings.

 

I'm the "official" all-sports award tabulator for the largest of the three leagues in my coverage area. I get $200 for what amounts to 20-30 minutes work after the state track meet is over. Each year, I print the results and the formula used for tabulating the results (9, 8, 7 ... 1 for a sport every school plays; different scales for those that don't have every school playing, such as soccer).

No complaints from the parents. I'm not even sure if they notice.

One odd thing is, one of the schools wins three or four sports each year but doesn't win the all-sports award because it wins soccer, which has only five teams, and both cross-country titles, which only have seven teams. Winning soccer, girls' golf and both cross country titles is worth 12 fewer points than winning football, both basketball titles and baseball, because the first four don't have every school participating. And 12 points the past few years has been the difference between winning the all-sports award and finishing fourth or fifth.

 

I thought this was an award for the worst sports drink and you named it the All-Sport award. Who remembers when that stuff used to be carbonated?

 

Clarion-Ledger does one for all the high schools in Mississippi (well, all the MHSAA school). It's strictly based on playoffs and how well a school does in each sport. You get x number of points for making the playoffs, and an increasing number for advancing at each round, up to a max of 30 for winning a state championship.
It's about as fair as you can get for one of these things, but in the smaller classes, it's weighted in favor of the richer (read, parochial) schools that have the resources to field championship caliber teams in sports like golf, tennis and soccer.

We've been doing this for years. One staff member does it. We write a story about it and run the results as charts. I have never heard a parent complain. It's pretty cut and dried, based on where teams finish in the respective sports.

 

We do a "Three-sport" athlete award at the end of the year...handing one out to a small-school winner and another for our big-school athlete...we also select a top "three-sport" athlete from each of the area schools...It's a big blowout feature page that helps carry us through some of these slow post-prep days.

One of my favorite issues of the year and it's been received well.