Does this irk anybody else about preps coverage?

really don't know, shotty. just have always done it that way and every shop I've been at has been the same. style thing, I guess.

 

When I was in sixth grade, our kickball diamond was on the far end of the playground. Our teacher always told us boys not to kick the ball on the roof of the school, but you know we had to try.

And wouldn't you know it, the one day I managed to do it, the photographer of the West Bofuck Bugle was there and got a shot of me doing it. I had to manually rewind film strips for the next three weeks after my teacher saw that in the paper.

Fuck newspapers. THIS is why they're dying. Fuck 'em.

 

Why would you intentionally kick the ball on the roof? Isn't that just game over?

 

Hell, no! We'd go over to the third-graders' diamond and take their kickball from them!

And that roof shot had as much macho cachet as hitting a home run in a Little League game, too.

 

With respect, I think you were indeed have been needlessly harsh in your phrasing! I agree with you entirely on principle - don't sugarcoat - but did they really "completely forget how to rebound the ball"? FORGET? Think about that literally for a moment. Could it actually possibly be true? Isn't it more likely they "neglected to box out" or "allowed (visiting team) players inside position" or "didn't jump aggressively for key rebounds"?

(Imagine if someone wrote an article about a bad feature you wrote and said "Schiezainc completely forgot how to write a lede." Wouldn't you protest, "I didn't 'forget'! I just didn't do it well that one time! I thought the anecdote would work; should've had the facts higher!" I imagine the girls on the team were thinking the rebounding equivalent.)

Your job is to tell the truth. But there is a distinction between explaining what happened and opining about what happened.

I also question the tone of the rest of it. "Found a way to win at losing"? "Giving away a victory"? Practically makes it seem like they were point-shaving. In reality, I'm 99% certain, they were girls who struggled with a full-court press, made too many cross-court passes, missed layups - and were beaten by a team that also played poorly but played better than them. Unless the losing team is the '95-96 Chicago Bulls of the Peoria Girls Basketball League, and unless its lead was, I don't know, 35 points, it didn't "spend 32 minutes seeing if it could give away a victory." There are many ways to creatively but non-needlessly-negatively write a lede for a "both teams played bad; one won" story. This wasn't one of them.

Anyway. I'm done. My ultimate point: you can avoid "fluff" while also avoiding put-downs.

 

You'd be writing a new draft for me.

 

Why is it that girls basketball teams are always either really great or awful? I once covered a game won by a local team 72-0. Yes, that was no misprint. The sad thing was that they stopped pressing halfway through THE FIRST QUARTER and emptied the bench before halftime. Yowsers!

Fortunately it wasn't an area team that got beat that bad. That would have been a fun story to write.

 

how did the game end?

 

split the uprights every time...

 

you shouldn't cover preps the same way you cover pros
you shouldn't intentionally embarrass anybody in a HS story, like the example above does - shows joy in the players' ineptitude
sirvalient's post is spot on. that's over-written and trying way too hard. you can write that a team shot 14 percent from the field without making fun of them.

 

That's pretty clumsily written. You may have felt clever writing it, but ugh. And yes, it was needlessly mean-spirited for a girls' basketball game. Or a boys' basketball game.