How do you feel about the fans in your audience?

Got into this a bit on the alabama spring game thread and thought I'd open it up to discussion.

For those of us who are regular beat writers and columnists, how do we feel about the people we write for--meaning, the sports fans in our particular audience?

While I'd agree some of them should be fitted for a straitjacket I've also had plenty of good conversations with fans of the team I cover.

Discuss.

 

Re: Poll on sports fans

Red Sox and Patriots fans are, by and large, incapable of rational thought when it comes to those two teams. Other than that, they're perfectly nice people.

 

The pro sports fans are pretty rational.

No comment on the high school and youth sports parents.

 

I can see that. I don't deal much with the youth sports crowd, and the high school stuff I'm responsible for is in sports marginal enough where they're just happy to get any coverage.

 

I voted "In general, they're a good group" for lack of a better choice.

What I like about my audience: they generally accept what I say as fairly close to "the truth." This makes my life fairly easy.

What I don't like about them: they tend to focus on what I think are unimportant things. The tensions I deal with in a story and fear being questioned on, those never come up. Instead, the readers will ask about the most tangential thing. I'm left scratching my head.

 

In general, they're tremendous people. But they're just so fucking stupid.

 

Curious, of those who vote "bane of my existence" do you cover preps? College? If so, what level? Pros?

 

I've found that in my preps coverage, the insanity of a fan/parent is in inverse proportion to how well-attended that sport is.
Football, volleyball, basketball, baseball/softball fans and parents are pretty cool. Swimming and track/cross country fans and parents are completely batshit.

 

For every prep parent that calls to yell at me about little Jimmy not getting a mention for catching one pass for six yards on a drive that resulted in a punt, I seem to get enough nice comments to call it even.

For every 10 college fans that call or e-mail me to rant about biased coverage or some other bullshit, I might get one complimentary message -- and that's usually only if their team wins.

 

A few schools around here just started lacrosse this season. As you can guess, they gots money.
They expect instant parity with the rest, even tho it's not a state-sanctioned sport. While the job is to cover as best you can, these people are the worst -- especially the teams with a "PR contact."

 

PR contact for a H.S. lax team? You gotta be kidding. Yuck.

Good luck dealing with that mess.

 

Since it's usually parents who dont know the coach should be calling, they treat it like a business model instead of calling and asking at the beginning of the season what to do.

Couple weeks ago, had this conversation -- ON DEADLINE -- with a parent.
Her: Why haven't our games been in the paper.
Me: Has your coach been calling?
Her: No! We want you to come to our games.
Me: Has your coach been calling?
Her: Our PR person called.
Me: Would this be the same person who called last night and told me "We won, but I forgot the score?"