High school vs. club team

I'd amend that to say I wouldn't watch televised high school sports outside my area.

We have games on local cable, and that's pretty cool when you actually have some background on the kids.

 

Pretty much.

With the sports staff cut from 12 to 2 and your pages being made up in Singapore, what are you going to cover anyway?

 

That's your reality ... don't make it a universal thing until it becomes one.

 

The disgusting thing is that the people running the 7-on-7 events are selling them to high school coaches and players as a way to get recruited. We did a story on this trend a few months ago where we talked to a college recruiting coordinator who said 7-on-7 wasn't of that much use in the recruiting process because the college coaches can't go there in person. They might see some video and look into a player further based on that, but that's it.

Even in the face of that, the high school coaches we talked to spoke about 7-on-7 like it's a way for players to get discovered. And it costs big bucks. One 7-on-7 team in our area went to a "national" tournament this year and estimated the trip was going to cost them $20,000.

 

My favorite is all the "fund-raising" fliers and emails I get to help "support these kids" because it's "for a good cause!" Uh, no, you playing out your unfulfilled adolescent dreams is not a good cause, and your organization is not a charity. My wife and I have had to draw a hard line that we will not contribute to any sport or league that isn't an all-comers rec environment. Sure catches the parents by surprise when we say that.

 

Yeah, that team tried to hit us up to cover their fund-raising efforts. No chance of that. We've got a coverage area full of AAU basketball teams that would come running to us for the same thing. It wouldn't end well.

 

Even better when the club teams, who have paid full-time staff (coaches and "general managers,") are soliciting donations "for the kids."

Uh, no. The donations are to pay your salary.

"The kids," that is, their parents, still get to pay you a couple thou every year to be in the program.

 

The only thing 7-on-7 is good for - if it's done right - is off season work for skill guys. That's a benefit for the high school team. But as was pointed out, it doesn't help from a recruiting standpoint because college coaches can't attend the event. And it also gives no indication of how good a kid is when the pads are on and they're getting hit.

 

I get these now and then too. The director (no matter the sport) always gives the pitch "your area is underrecruited, we can help" and parents fall for it hook, line and sinker 99 and 44/100ths of the time. There's one group that ran a combine here that picked a kid to go to another combine in the Midwest for the possibility he might get picked for an all-star game that'll be televised. You just want to grab the parents and say, "If your kid is talented enough, he'll get scouted! Save your money for books and tuition!!" You see the same thing happen with the groups that pick all-star teams for trips to China, Australia, ect., and want the kids to raise funds for the trip. It's cheaper to fly there on your own and you can enjoy the country and not have to play any games.

The other thing these groups never mention: Outside of football and basketball, there are very few full rides out there. It's particularly bad in baseball and soccer, where the NCAA allows a certain amount of scholarships, but gives the coach the opiton of giving partial scholarships. Don't know if a similar situation exists in softball or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

 

I have a few AAU coaches who lean on me pretty hard to get their tryout notices in the sports notebook.
Our company policy for the section is that it has to be a nonprofit. My policy is that the local, community-based programs (Little League, Pop Warner, etc.) have priority over the regional groups such as AAU, so if we're tight on space, I'll do more to accommodate the local groups than the regional ones.
I've explained this to a few of these people and they still don't quite get it. One AAU basketball guy used to e-mail me each week. At the end of the e-mail he said "If you want me to stop sending this e-mail, promise that you will publish this in each of your papers."
I flagged his e-mail address as spam and that took care of that.
Another AAU coach went to my supervisor after I didn't run his notice on the same week I had two high school teams winning state titles, a state swim meet and a Thanksgiving Day football game to preview.
It never fails to amaze me how pushy some people get when it comes to what is basically free advertising.

 

Politely ask him to buy some advertising.

 

Girls volleyball: FSN also televised the CIF finals and repeats it throughout the year.
What was the event televised last Saturday? Was it the Festival final or the Junior Olympics final?
Festival is basically a West Coast tournament for all-comers, a huge event that I think moved to Phoenix recently after a few years in Reno. Teams in the Junior Olympics have to qualify throughout the club season. Those are the elite teams.

For girls volleyball, club is definitely more important. The club season here begins with tryouts and practices Nov-Dec. The tournaments start in January and go through June.
High school, there is informal workouts in the summer. They get together the last week of August and practice for a couple of weeks then the season starts the first of September and ends the first of November, two months.
A few years ago at our high school preseason parents meeting, the coach said rather shyly, "I can't tell you that your kids have to play club ... but ... they have to play club."