Is this letter out of line?

My feelings got hurt by a parent, were they out of line?

 

The coach needs to read this thread, not that he'd get anything out of it.

"Public humiliation"? Is he serious? It's been said already here and worth it again: Life ain't all about going 10-0 every single season. It's making mistakes, figuring out how to correct those mistakes and doing what it takes to make oneself better.

I expect this from mommies and daddies and even experienced something right along these lines during the recent football season - but not a coach.

 

FWIW,

This is not an unusual complaint. Unwarranted, but not unusual.

 

Nothing to add, except to say that this is some damn good photography. They should be proud of their shooters.

 

The bowl system is about as close as California's going to come to a state playoff, FWIW, without a radical shakeup of the state setup. We're talking section sizes in single digits (SF and Oakland) to the hundreds (Southern). There's some talk of going to two rounds of bowls, but, of course, that's eating into basketball.

Field was wet and sloppy (Home Depot Center, so, yes, you can blame soccer!) and looked pretty much like a mud bog on TV for the Open Div. finale Saturday (Concord De La Salle vs. Anaheim Servite).

But I digress ... coach is entitled to his opinions, is mad local team lost, so why not blame the media! Or maybe we should write about how hard they tried ...

 

It used to be fairly common for papers in my area to publish Xs and 0s of what happened during games superimposed over photos back in the 1940s and 1950s. I haven't studied them extensively, but I could guarantee they have some that show missed assignments.

 

Great photos. How can you not use those? I loved the fumble sequence. And the emotion shots at the end are compelling. Action and emotion make great photos.
I don't think the letter is out of line, just out of touch. But it's the rare coach that is actually in touch and "gets it."

 

My coworker and I had a high school field hockey championship game go to triple overtime last fall (2009). Local team lost, he took a great photo of a girl devastated. Absolutely wrecked.

We ran it, big, on the front page. The only person who complained? The receptionist turned editorial assistant that didn't know her ass from her elbow and accused us of trying to make this girl "feel bad".

Fast forward 12 months. My coworker won third place in the state press awards for the picture. Same team gets to the finals, again. This time they win in overtime. We run a gigantic picture of the girls celebrating.

And this is the whole point.

It doesn't matter who wins, it doesn't matter who loses. We pick the photos that are the most telling, most captivating and most lively to go with the stories in our paper.

Sometimes, little Johnny football is going to be the hero. Sometimes he's going to be the goat. But it's not our job to decide how the photos we run are going to make people "feel". We're there to tell the story, not tell people what reactions they should have from the story.

Anytime this comes up, I smile, nod politely and tell the parent (or coach) in question that if we're a newspaper, not a yearbook.

 

Wait a minute, can we allow both a poindexter and a bpoindexter at SportsJournalists.com, much less commenting on the same thread?

I am now waiting on Thee Big Ragu and Aces to show up.

 

You run the best photos you have, and the ones that best tell the story of the game. We got the same kind of reaction years ago when our basketball team fell in the big-school basketball finals and we had players crying on the front page. We captured the emotion of the night and ran with it...that's good work, nothing that needs to be corrected.

 

It's not "out of the line," but it's a little overstated.

Basically, this reader is looking for a different product than the one your sports department is interested in offering