High School Milestones

1,000 point scorers? Meh. Game inflation tends to make that a little less significant that it might have been a few years ago. A hell of a note, that's about it.

But you should keep tabs on your school and area career scoring leaders and such.

To have a player threaten a school mark, especially if it's held by someone who went on to accomplish something at the college or NBA level, now that's significant.

 

For us, it depends on if we staffed the game or not.

 

At my last stop, the coaches were good about letting me know about kind of milestone (points, steals, rebounds, etc.) I even had one mother come up to me at a basketball game and tell me she expected something in the paper about her son scoring his first points of his career. My response? By an f'n ad, lady!

 

Most of our coaches and athletic directors are pretty good about letting us know beforehand, or including it in the box scores they send us.

The event usually seems to happen at an away game at a school that may or may not be in the same conference but it is definitely not a school we cover -- always fun because someone will usually call later to complain that we weren't there, we hate their school, blah, blah, blah.

We mention it when we know, and run a photo of said kid if the photog happens to get him/her or if we set up that way beforehand.

Some fans are never satisfied, though. We had an area kid set a state career scoring record a couple years back and we had THE game covered well, along with a whole bunch of other media outlets, from print to TV. We still got complaints that year that we concentrated on him too much.

 

Once upon a time, it was a big deal. Now I guess it depends upon the community you cover and how well you cover them.

 

Because our state limits teams to 20 regular-season games per year, and it's very rare to see a freshman play varsity (or a sophomore have a big scoring role), we see very few 1,000 point scorers, so it is a big deal when we have one. When I was an SE, we tried to at least have a photo ... the games were probably going to be staffed anyway (it was a small shop), so we just played it up in the gamer/did a sidebar on it.

 

A lot of the coaches and ADs have become quasi-dependent on the local prep guy to serve as a defacto SID ... It wouldn't hurt for high schools to develope some sort of program that includes website updating as well.

 

With my current stop, 1,000 will get a blurb in a notebook or a sideplot in a story if we happen to cover the game.

One player we cover scored her 3,000th career point in December. We're waiting until she breaks or is about to break that state's (boy AND girl) record (she just claimed No. 2 this week) to do a feature, I believe.

 

When I hit my 50th home run of the 2001 season, no one covered that.

 

So, are you assuming we don't do a good job of covering our schools?

Cause I can assure you, Drippy, that's not the case.

 

The AD is the key recordkeeper. I once had a situation where I knew there was a coach nearing 500 wins, but she wouldn't tell me how many she had -- she knew she was going to get there during a very tough postseason and didn't want to put any extra pressure on her kids, so she didn't tell anyone she was on the cusp of 500.

Oh, the coach is also the A.D.

 

I think it really depends on the size of the paper and the importance of high school sports.

At a place with a big coverage area, you might get a couple dozen kids each season. You cover four schools, you might get one every other year.

If the kid is an underclassman, I think it's more important, same if he/she is the first 1,000-point scorer in school history.

My reference point is 40,000-circulation daily with 25 schools. I would say it leads the round-up at least and you try to get there if you can.

How do you know? Again, size (of the paper) matters. If you are doing full previews of all the teams, you ask that question when you do the preview: "Any kids close to 1,000 (2,000).

On an aside, it's been 22 years and two days since Tracy Lis became the first girl in Connecticut state basketball history to score 2,000 points.

Why do I remember? Between the game and the writing of the story, I got to see my second daughter born.

Thank goodness we were still a PM then.