High School coaches blowing you off

In our preps coverage I try not to single out huge blunders made by kids for the most part, however, I will point out when teams/players step over the line regarding sportsmanship.

At a baseball game years ago, I was sitting right next to the dugout and saw the "home" team behaving terribly, shouting insults at the other team, spitting sunflower seeds and other gunk at opposing players along the baseline, etc. The coach was in there laughing about it.

I questioned the coach about it after the game, and he just kind of blew it off.

So the next day, it's included in part of the story, and this coach stone-walled me the rest of his coaching days. He was never the best at calling in results anyway and retired a few years later, so not a huge deal. And oh yes, the kids wouldn't talk to me either...that part lasted all of two games.

 

Did you get any heat from readers/parents? I find if you print stuff like that you inevitably get the calls and emails saying the other team started it or somesuch.

Not saying you shouldn't have written it, though .....

 

Our coaches range from good to really good, from co-operative to very helpful ... that said, I use whatever quotes help best in driving the story ... half the time the coach quotes don't make the cut, and almost never is the coach the first one quoted .... I have never, ever had a reader even bring the subject up ...

 

I've had one situation where a coach walked away in mid-sentence frustrated after a loss, but that's about it. I was still able to get a quote from the athletes, so it wasn't that big of a deal.

 

I've had plenty of coaches I wouldn't mind it from. Mostly volleyball.

 

I've had coaches tell me they wanted to talk to their team first. If my deadline allowed, I worked with it. Usually I'd go talk to the other coach. Otherwise, I'd go without the quote.

I did have a situation at a former shop where the basketball team at one school had a deal with Nike for shoes, t-shirts, bags, warmups, etc. I did a story about it and how the kids were getting to keep all that stuff. During the course of it, the coach reamed me out, saying he wouldn't talk to me and neither would his players if the story ran. The story ran, and I didn't test it for a couple of games, focusing instead on the school's girls team. When I went in to talk to the boys coach again, he talked.

This stuff kind of depends on the situation. Is the school the primary (or only) focus of your coverage? The thing that stuck with me from that experience was that you almost always have options.

 

This happens to me from time to time. This last fall I covered a HS football team with a couple of elite recruits on it who were the center of a lot of regional media coverage this year. The coach would sometimes avoid me and other reporters and was cutting off media access to his athletes after games and practices and going out of his way to keep his star players away from me. He would then close each interview with, "Don't put in the paper that I said you couldn't talk to my players," which I told him I would have to do to explain why I didn't have quotes from the running back who rushed for 280 yards and four touchdowns in the a playoff victory.

Fortunately I had a pretty good relationship with him where he told me he was doing it because sites like Scout and Rivals were writing about these kids twice a day and making their heads so big they were going to explode and do in his team with them. He kind of let me back in the fold a bit after I reminded him of all the other stories I had done on his other players in the previous two seasons alone.

I've had other coaches downright tell me off after a tough loss or if we wrote something that pushed their buttons, which usually meant I profiled a kid on a rival cross-town team before I did one on one of his kids that season. There's one local coach who is usually a nice, helpful and polite guy, but he's blown up on me after games three times in two years. Each time he called to apologize and offer some quotes before I even got back to the office.

 

what mental midget came up with this one? unbelievable

so you have some all-state kid heading to a D-1 school who finishes his career with a bunch of records and honors and and if the final game of his distinguished career comes in a tournament loss ... you can't write about him?

really?

 

Yes, some coaches won't talk after a game. That's life. There's always another game.

I'd be more worried about your paper's policy. I know we've had the debate on whether to cover high school kids like the pros, but high school players are big boys.

Does your paper not get quotes from a City Council member if there's a controversial issue?

Going on what Gonna Buy Me a Dog wrote:

"After a tough loss, we're not allowed to ask three-time all-state senior Joe Gaspumper about the game because our publisher/editor is an idiot."

Nuclear fallout must have gotten in someone's Corn Flakes/

 

Why would you cover all 21 games of a winless team?

As for the original point of the post, forget talking to the assistant. He'll only get heat from the coach for talking to you, if he talks at all.
Regardless of paper's policy, who have to talk to the kids afterward.

 

Yeah, any long-time board member here can likely recall my great story from a couple of football seasons ago where a coach didn't like what I wrote about his team and spent the first three minutes of our interview verbally berating me with enough F-Bombs to sink a small warship. I wouldn't have minded, really, but two reporters from other papers were in that interview with me and still tease me about it to this day.

On the plus side, I kept my cool and kept asking questions relevant to my story, even after he told me in no uncertain terms to go make love to myself.

 

If you haven't had a coach rip into you, you're in the wrong business.