First day of football practice

My weekly's tab is always popular and has the ads. However, we include all the sports, not just football — full preview stories and pics on the teams from the two in-town schools and info capsules and pics on the teams from the area's other seven schools.
The daily I work for switched from a tab to a broadsheet a few years ago and it's also still popular. It has full preview stories and pics on all the football teams and info capsules and pics for all of the other sports.

 

We had a tab in the past and do the team countdown now, with 15 area schools. There are pros and cons to both. I like the countdown because it allows you to write a lot more about each school than when we crammed them in the tab. The con is that the presentation has to be the same for every school, tying up your centerpiece for 15 straight days and completely hamstringing your ability to play up any other huge breaking local news or any other features. I cover the DI school in town and don't write a ton of features during this time because they get buried thanks to the prep countdown.

 

Amen, brother.

 

Well....My editor at the daily made contact:
I am down to one pre for one of two colleges and one pre for one of two HS I had been doing (He said paper's owners continue to tighten budget -- and as long as I have known him, I tend to believe him).

 

Not sure if I totally agree on the last point. If you have several different classes of schools, you don't have to give the same play to a team with 25 players as you do a large school with 85 players. The harsh reality of life is that the bigger schools have more people, more fans, more alums. It's Alabama vs. Troy State.

 

It's obviously too late for this season, but IMO your coverage should be roughly weighted by your circulation within each school district (your CD should be able to tell you this).

Usually, but not always, circulation is pretty proportional to school enrollment.

You want to put your resources where you get the best bang for the buck.

 

Agreed. But even there you may multiple schools of different sizes within the same district. Larger schools = more families, more students, more alums, more readers.

 

There are some exceptions, though. We have a small school on the outer edge of our coverage area located in a town of about 400 that is a football factory. They've always got multiple D-1 prospects, and as a result, there is more interest in them than would ordinarily be the case for a school that size, and we cover them accordingly.

 

Michigan just instituted a raft of practice regulations - extending the time before teams are allowed to go full pads, mandating only one practice a day can be full-pad, limiting 'collision' practices to two a week in the regular season and capping per-day practice times to three hours for a single practice or five for 2-a-days, so there's a hook for us.

 

Understandable. Schools like that tend to develop loyal fan followings and it's good to react accordingly.

 

Not only that, but they draw interest from casual fans who want to see what the fuss is about and college fans for the recruiting angle.

 

Talk about begging for rule-skirting.

Hell, I'd reduce or eliminate the days before practice in pads -- 98% of all teams and all players have been in the virtual equivalent of no-pad practice all summer.

I'd say go in pads on day one and start hitting on Friday of the first week.