High School coaches blowing you off

And if it's not the coach on the other end, you're screwed.

 

ask better questions

 

Yeah, that's the problem when it comes to dealing with high school coaches and teenagers -- the questions....... :

 

Or, like he said, don't use the cliche-filled quotes.

 

I don't ever and I think one of the most overrated and lazy things we do as journalists is use quotes when they don't add a thing to the story, just because someone somewhere said every story we write must have quotes.

 

I'm sure your wife wouldn't mind, either.

 

That's not even in the top 10 of lazy things I can do.

 

Agree with those who say it's silly not to interview kids when they lose.

P.S. Your unsolicited grammar reminder: People don't "decline comment," or "refuse comment," except in journalism jargon. They decline to comment. (To decline comment makes sense logically only if you offered to give them some comment, and they said, no thanks, I'll not have any.)

 

My first year as an SE, one of the local coaches (who was working in a community that fired its coach every year, so every word was probably read and parsed extremely closely) was pretty cool for quite some time, then started sending his assistant out to talk to me after losses. It was annoying, but the assistant handled it pretty well. Turned out to be good practice for him, because he would be the varsity coach in a different sport the next year. Said varsity coach then coached softball in the spring and was great with me. He lasted one more year in that role, and I don't think has been a varsity coach since.

Had another incident where a neighboring (non-competing) paper had reported a player's getting into trouble (I believe, with the law, but I'm not certain). Coach of said school freezes the paper out. We both go up to interview him after a game, and he immediately asks us our affiliations. Guy from the opposing paper gives his, he says "beat it" to him and then answers every one of my questions.

One of my stringers had a long-running feud with a local school, and two different football coaches froze him out (and he had been trained, like a lot of stringers, to just get coach quotes ... I was trying to break him of it ) because of coverage they deemed "too negative." One just high-tailed it to the locker room and never came out until after deadline.

 

This happened to me just last week.

I covered a double-local high school girls basketball game. The two teams were rivals -- naturally -- and it wasn't pretty. School A, a final four team last season that very well could win it all this year, laid the smackdown on School B from start to finish. It was made worse with a fourth quarter that saw A's entire bench just annihilate B's starting squad.

B's coach came out of the locker room and saw me. I didn't even approach him or say anything, and he came right up to me and said, "I don't got nothing to say. We sucked. You saw it," and walked away.

The interesting thing is that I've never interviewed him before. I met him at the beginning of the basketball season, but have never spoken with him. He's also considered to be, by my editor, one of the nicest coaches in the area.

It was an off-night for him, as other posters have said.

While I could have used his "we sucked" quote in the story, I decided not to and just wrote he declined to comment. Apparently the next day the coach apologized profusely to his athletic director before anyone had said anything to him. We didn't hear an apology directly (except from the AD), but I'm sure he's learned his lesson.

 

Why do you even need a quote from the losing coach in that instance and why should he have to apologize for saying "I got nothing to say. We sucked."
And he didn't decline to comment. That was his comment.

 

Semi-related: I know a guy who will talk to someone on a topic for five or six minutes and then say, "So, can you give me a quote for something we're putting together?" It always makes me think of two things: One, you've lost your most interesting stuff in the previous five minutes, and two, you're way too likely to get a PR-version quote when you prepare the guy.

"Give me a quote?" Give me a break.