Not covering Little League All-Stars

Agreed with MileHigh regarding the WWL. I always figure, since I don't even get scores from the leagues here that are affiliated with Little League, and kidball in our home city switched from Little League to Ripken a few years ago (and I don't get scores from them either), why make a fuss over the LLWS, just because it's on the tube?

 

Our policy is never to staff anything below high school varsity. If you want to submit a team photo or info for a brief, we'll be glad to run it. Once you start doing more than that, you open a huge can of worms.

 

Invoking "can of worms" opens a can of worms. If we're not careful, we start rationalizing everything we don't cover that way.

If you staff the title game for the "marquee" division, the Majors (11-12), that doesn't necessarily mean you have to cover the Minors, Juniors, Seniors and girls' softball.

As far as the ESPN stuff goes, we've danced this dance before. You may think it's an abomination to televise 11-12 year olds for three weeks. But the points are this:

1. People watch it, or they don't expand the coverage.

2. If you've ever been to the South Williamsport experience, it's hard to knock it. It's difficult to turn that into a negative for the kids.

3. I've been around people who went through it, later on. It's not as if the Little League tournament experience twisted their lives.

In summary, it's different for different papers, of course. But whereas you may not feel the need to cover the district final, it's probably a good idea not to ignore a team that gets into state tournament play and beyond.

 

This has been our policy, too. With Iowa playing its prep baseball and softball in the summer, we get eight weeks a year when there's no high school sports going on, and of those eight weeks, 4-5 of them are spent working on all-area teams from the previous season and previewing the upcoming seasons. There is no free time for us.

We cover three local high schools and 20-plus area high schools. Last week, when these LL teams were playing in their state tournament, the five softball and baseball teams from the three local high schools (one softball team is a co-op of the two smaller high schools) were playing either to go to state (softball) or starting tournament play (baseball). Oh, and we had a triathlon that has become one of the top events in the Midwest to cover over the weekend. And we had a PGA Tour golfer who grew up in our area, who has won a major, playing in a Tour event 90 minutes from here.

What I want to say to these people is what, exactly, should we have not covered to send a reporter five consecutive days to a town two hours away to cover Little League?

And then there's this — if the 12-year-old girls team wins the state title, they go to Indianapolis for the regional tournament. That's seven days in Indianapolis ... the same weekend as the Brickyard 400. Just for the hell of it, I looked up hotel rates for that weekend. By the end of the tournament, we would pay more than $1000 just for hotel to cover that. That's not counting meals and and other travel expenses. And with us heading into the last couple of months of the fiscal year, my travel budget is pretty well wiped out.

 

Covering the youth sports is a slippery slope. My paper covers the tournaments because parents are interested (they buy extra copies of the paper for out of town family members), the website gets extra hits and the paper gets a little extra money from selling copies of photos from games our photographer(s) are at.

But as one fellow desker many years ago said "at this rate pretty soon we'll be covering the pre-natal leagues"

 

Then you don't cover it. For manpower reasons. Or for financial reasons.

What I'm questioning is not covering it out of some feeling that we're making coin on the exploitation of youth baseball players.

 

I'm fine with event coverage for Little League All-Stars, only because games take place during a time in the summer when NOTHING is going on. And I'd argue that these games are higher up on the totem pole than Legion ball, which I find completely pointless with the advent of showcase tourneys, and especially when your local team is comprised mostly of graduated seniors/college players.

 

We try to follow that policy, with the lone exception being the 12-year-old Williamsport/Portland Little League division. American Legion is going into the postseason next week, so we'll likely start covering those tournaments soon since those are our high school players.

Everybody else can submit results via e-mail (to a generic account which isn't monitored the rest of the year) and they'll be compiled once a week. Response has been nearly nonexistent this summer.

The problem is that we're supposed to have a local story, preferably centerpiece-worthy, every day. Without the rest of Little League and other youth sports, that's extremely difficult to maintain.

 

I work in a pretty baseball-rich community –– to put it in perspective, baseball here is bigger than football, and this is Texas –– so not covering Little League would be a slap in the face, as far as the community is concerned. I'd be willing to bet that Little League is as big as high school sports. Randomly I'll go out and cover games, if for nothing else to my hours out of the office, and more often than not the bleachers are packed, with parents/families/etc. three rows deep in lawn chairs behind the fence, and what's left is a standing room only crowd. Some parents resort to pulling up their trucks behind the field, cracking open a few beers with the radio broadcast coming through the speakers –– despite the signs that say no alcohol allowed in the city parks, but even the police around here tend to ignore that during LL games.

And most surprisingly of all, we've received minimal complaints from parents. Nearly all of them come up and talk to us at the games, thanking us for coming out. Sure it might be kissing ass and whatnot, but it's better than coming into the office with a phone full of hate voicemails –– which I can't say is the case when swim season rolls around.

 

We haven't been staffing either, but if teams are willing to submit info, I'll run it. And if Podunk National starts bitching because their games aren't in, but Podunk American is, I'll tell them the truth: Podunk American uses those unlimited night and weekend minutes.

The other thing the whiny parents don't factor in: From the time we run All-County teams in spring sports in late June/early July until the start of football practices in late July, this is the only time all year we can squeeze in extended vacation time. At our company, there's a hard use-it-or-lose-it deadline at the end of the month as well for accrued time.

Most of the teams in our area are happy just to submit a team photo at the end of the season and let it go at that, since many go two-and-barbecue. But had to laugh at a line in one info packet from a team raising funds to go to a "national" tournament: "Let's put Podunk on the map." I wanted to call Rand McNally to ask why our fair city wasn't on the map.

 

Welllll ... I understand that as well as you. But you can't ask your readership to consider that as a reason for not doing something.

 

Agreed with you there jr. But it's nice to have an ace in the hole when that one unreasonable caller invests a dime.