But they work so hard!!!!!

Oh, well there ya go.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

I agree with Zeke. Don't do it. Ever. I don't care how much the parents bitch.

 

What if there are, say, 2,000 people at the games?

I'm not talking about listening to parents. I'm talking about gaging interest (which wouldn't often be there, I grant you)

 

If you cover it for Big City High, you have to cover it for every school in the area. It's Pandora's Box; there's no sense opening it.

 

At my weeklies, I try to avoid doing straight previews as much as possible. I prefer to do features and jump right into game coverage if I can.
Previews tend to have a certain sameness about them and there's always at least one team that for one reason or another, you don't get to preview and parents who say "What about that team?"

 

They only practice three hours a week? Wow, what a bunch of pussies.

I'm all about cheerleading being a sport, but a cheerleading preview section would never happen. We should all quit if that happens.

 

Fuck the cheerleaders.



Take that however you want.

 

Perhaps "reward" was the wrong choice of word. What I meant by that was that covering JV and frosh trivializes varsity coverage. Both are high school sports, sure, but you don't play for championships in JV and while I know JV/frosh cuts exist, I've never covered a high school that did. It's a kind of "give an inch take a mile" thing I'd rather not get into: once you start covering freshmen and JV it just adds fuel to the fire for folks wanting Pop Warner and cheer competition gamers.

And honestly, I can't imagine there are very many places that would have an interest in JV coverage beyond the JV parents. I'm not applying that to everywhere, but my guess is it'd be a 95-5 split.

 

Not only that, the minute you write a 1-inch tag-on capsule on Hooterville High's JV team, then the parents from Bugtussle Tech go nuts, screaming that they only got an 8-inch story on their varsity game, while you were off wasting time on the goddamn JV game at Hooterville.

You can't write actual game stories on any JV team anywhere, unless and until you are covering the hell out of every varsity team everywhere in your coverage area.

When varsity and JV are played together at the same site, if I cover the game, I'll tack on a 1-paragraph cap on the JV game onto the varsity story: "Joe Schmoe had 15 points as Hooterville's JVs took a 43-38 win." Or, tack a scoreline onto the bottom of the varsity box: JVs: "Hooterville 43, Pixley 38."

When JVs are played separately from the varsity, it's an agate brief. Same with freshman or any junior high result. Agate briefs. That's it.

 

If somebody sends me a short write-up of a JV or freshman team, I'll publish it on either the third or fourth page. The only problem I've had is that one person called after seeing a story on one subvarsity team and wondered why we didn't cover another one. Apparently, the reader failed to make a distinction between a bylined story that I or a paid stringer would do and a brief submitted by a parent.
Another time a track coach who never returned a call complained at the end of a season about a lack of track coverage and pointed out that we ran pages of youth soccer.
I tried to point out that youth sports and high school varsity was apples and oranges (we either cover varsity games in person or chase them over the phone while we don't cover youth soccer games or call or e-mail coaches should they choose not to send game write-ups) and that didn't seem to register with the coach.

 

I don't care if there are 20K at the game.

Because, logically, if there are 20K at the JV game, there must be 200K at the varsity game, and your time would be better spent on previews or features or sidebars related to that.

Can you follow that?

If the players aren't good enough to play varsity, the paper has a better place to use its resources and the kids should have the right to develop outside of the scope of media coverage.

They don't cut people from JV. It's developmental. You don't cover it in the paper.

 

My dad has officiated high school football for nearly 20 years. While in college, I would go home and make $20 running the chains for his crew.

I am here to confirm that we don't work hard.