Is your paper cutting back on prep football coverage?

They trade points all day until the better team makes a decisive run.

It's just like basketball, but sexier.

 

I think we'll be doing about the same as last year, maybe a slightly sharper focus on Friday night time management and a little more non-football coverage through the week.

We're doing six staffed games tonight, whereas we might get up to 7 or 8 once the full schedule comes on line in a week or so.

We're still not where we need to be in terms of a Web presence. That's coming, though.

 

That has been an emphasis of ours as well. We've really tried to not make our fall sports coverage so football-dominant and award volleyball and cross country their equal share of coverage as well.

It's tough, because you can never cover football enough in Texas.

 

This will be a little long for my first post, but I can see we're all in the same boat here ... suggestions welcome.

We've got several things going on at once as the season starts. It's me and one writer at a 15K or so pm weekdays/am weekends that covers seven schools, with the bulk of the attention going to the three public schools within 10 miles of the office (thank goodness they're in the same league). In a few weeks, we'll be killing the Sunday paper and making the Saturday a weekender, as well as printing at one of our sister papers instead of our own office, meaning an 11:30 deadline on Friday night.

I get three open pages a night, the third being agate. I'm converting that third page to an NFL preview page (since there's no such thing as too much NFL or too much NASCAR, IMO) that I can get out before we head out to games. About half the second page will be dedicated to agate, with those labor-intensive major league boxes moving to the web. I usually cover the game in town (about 5 minutes away, depending on the lights) and the writer gets the best game of the night we can go to within county borders.

No preview tab, but we're launching a preview series next week. I'm sending a writer and shooter to each school for the previews, figuring a little face time, rather than trading emails or playing phone tag, will lead to more calls on Fridays, especially from the outlying areas.

 

And fill the story with stats, which volleyball coaches are more than happy to provide.

"Britney had 27 kills, 17 assists and 33 digs. Jessica had 18 kills, 45 assists and 19 digs. Christine had 44 aces, 19 digs and 12 assists."

And then spend two paragraphs explaining what the "libero" is.

-30-

 

Prep volleyball coaches love to make up stats, too, like "perfect passes" and "service points."

 

We love volleyball. No boxscore.

 

No boxscore!?! That's some bullshit. I can't do a gamer without some agate!

 

I want to go there.

 

Or confuse perfect passes with assists.

 

;D

What? Shrink that? OK ...

Player K-HitPct-Aces-Digs-Blocks

 

The papers that have trimmed staff a few times in the past few years and also have lost their freelance budgets and then put together a special section proclaiming they are the prep football source for the (insert name here) Valley or the (insert name here) County or the (insert name here) Desert or the (insert name here) Coast or the (insert name here) District or the (insert name here) Region or the (insert name here) Bayou or the (insert name here) Badlands frighten me.

Instead of trying to fool your readers and high school coaches, how about being a COMMITTED paper and sucking it up. Hire the stringers and use your staff more wisely on prep football Friday nights instead of this weasly way of proclaiming "we're the source for the (insert name here)" when everyone on the staff knows that the product is a piece of (insert your favorite way of saying feces here).

Sack up, sports editors. Quit being afraid of the nobodies on the news side who know nothing about running YOUR section.