Coaching

We have a columnist at our shop who tried to coach a local Legion B baseball team. We are a preps driven market and Legion B is one of the only things we can cover during the summer.
Obviously this did not go over well and the columnist was told not to do so, but still would like to volunteer for the team. How far should he be allowed to go before he crosses the line? In my mind, he shouldn't be affiliated with the team at all, but he doesn't see it that way.

 

If he's full-time, he definitely shouldn't be doing it, but I've seen it before at other places, with high school teams. I've know of one reporter who played in an over-30 league and when the high school team he covered needed a left-handed pitcher to face in batting practice before a game, guess who was doing it.

 

How big is the town and the paper?

 

It's tough, especially in the small towns where you can sometimes see that they need the help. Here they've been trying to get me to help with football since I've got previous experience as an offensive lineman and an offensive line coach that they can't seem to find elsewhere.

I'd love to help, but certainly not while I'm covering the team and I've made that fairly clear. Sometimes I will give a kid a tip at practice if I'm already there for work reasons (and I'd do that for a rival team too), but I try to keep it clear, especially on game days that my priority is writing.

 

Don't coach anything in your coverage area.

Not college, not high school, not youth rec.

If your paper covers your team, all the other parents will bitch and wonder why.

If your paper doesn't cover your team, all the parents on your team will bitch and wonder why not.

 

is the guy a news columnist or a sports columnist?

 

I think that is a bit absurd. I'm quite sure the fact that I coach my son's recreational soccer team, mostly because they needed more volunteers to coach or they were not going to be able to have a season, is not an ethical or moral problem. I can say with quite a bit of confidence that coverage of our team, our league or any league like it would never even be considered...

You could certainly see the problem with the columnist coaching a legion team that is heavily covered by the local paper or even a high school team that is likely covered by the paper, but that is much different than coaching youth sports, particularly of the recreational kind.

 

Publisher of a paper north of here is an assistant high school football coach at a town 30 miles away. Doesn't cover them. I have no problem with that.

 

Sports columnist, 25K circ., 80K pop.

 

then not only no, but hell no.

 

You got a guy who works as a full-time sports columnist at a 25K circ. paper? Wow.

 

Let this be a lesson on why there shouldn't be sports columnists at 25K circ. papers.