Letting a coach off the hook

If it's me, I'm not sweating it. Unless it's a playoff game for a team that really matters in my coverage area, I'm not calling around trolling for scores/results. Our philosophy is if a coach doesn't call in his/her results after a game (or have someone else designated to do it), then they don't get in the paper. Period. We've got 35 high schools in our area and we don't have time on deadline to call the ones who don't care enough to report their results. Our coaches know the drill, and when the parents call demanding to know why their school's results aren't in the paper, we tell them exactly why. The only exception is during football season, there are a couple of our biggest city schools that we will make an effort to run down something on, but that's it.

 

I would have told her I needed the details or I would call her AD.

Then I would call the AD and tell him if he wants his school's results in the paper, he gets you the info.

I understand the busy night, but I would *definitely* follow it up with the AD and the principal if necessary.

 

The AD, and then the principal, will usually cover the coach's ass.

Go straight to the school superintendent, and tell them "unless we can be strongly assured coaches are reporting accurate game results, we will have to reassess running any sports results from your school, at all, ever."

P.S., the closer to midnight (or even after) you make this call, the better. If you reach the super's house and a spouse (or somebody else) says, "I'm sorry, they're in bed," respond, "Wake them up. This is critical."


That'll fix it in exactly as long as it takes the super to slam down his phone and speed dial the school principal.

 

No self-respecting, professional journalist I've ever met is going to call a school superintendent after midnight to demand a principal forces the softball coach to provide a score. Maybe a call/e-mail the next day, but an after-midnight call, and "wake them up. This is critical."

Drama, much?

 

It works.

Of course, we've only ever done it on football or boys basketball, the only sports we'd chase anyway. If softball doesn't call in, we don't care. If a softball coach told us she wasn't going to tell us the accurate score of the game, we'd just hang up the phone.

 

I see that your aren't familiar with Starman justice.

 

You can try to tiptoe your way up the food chain, but sad experience proves that most junior bureaucrats on their way up the paper ladder will tend to cover the asses of the underlings. Going straight to the top short-circuits that whole masturbatory exercise.

 

"Coach, we can do this one of two ways. One, you tell me the score and I get off your back. Two, I call every parent, every kid who watched that game and get the score from them. Then I run a story about you being a bitch.

"Now, what's your pick?"

Obviously, I wouldn't advocate going that far, but you get the point.

 

Tell the coach you totally understand, and use this as the basis to develop a budding friendship.

When, in the course of this new relationship, you are invited to his house, upperdeck him, and leave a post-it on his toilet that says "What's the score now? Me 1, You 0"

 

I've seen it on here many a time, but it finally happened to me two weeks ago: I got one of those "I don't want to tell you because I don't want the other teams to know what happened."

Well, unfortunately for you, you told me what happened before giving me that qualifier. And I ran it, because really, what difference does it make?

I also got an inner-city game about four days ago that was something like 28-16 with a combined 52 hits and somehow there were "no errors." Knowing that both teams are 1-15 and struggling to find players to bring to the dirt "field" every day, I let it be.

All I'm saying is, sometimes it's just not worth it to put up a fight. In principle, yes. But when I have 9,000 things to do, haggling a coach over these details is not up there at the top of the list.

In summary, I see all points here, and I think smallpotatoes is fine doing what he/she did.

 

Had to google "upperdeck." That doesn't mean to leave baseball cards at the guy's house. Very nice.

 

That's kind of crazy IMO.
In our neck of the woods, the superintendent likely would complain ... about us.
They don't seem to like newspapers all that much round here.