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Seventh-grade Jordans never pan out

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Gator, Dec 17, 2009.

  1. flexmaster33

    flexmaster33 Well-Known Member

    I couldn't agree with you more. We do cover a lot of HS games, and have the Athlete of the Week, etc. And it's still never enough. But here's the tricky part. As the economy goes, and everyone is downsizing, our harder work is still never enough. At my shop, we no longer have interns, meaning everyone is stretched a bit thinner, and we can no longer get to as much.

    So people are used to seeing "Tournament A" covered and "Championship game B" covered, because it's been that way in the past. Now if we don't show up, people are all over my ass. It's the nature of teh beast, I guess, but it sucks nonethless.
    [/quote]

    We are dealing with that exact same thing...along with updating our format to bigger feature stories. Less staffing (no stringers) and new format (big feature pieces) mean less game coverage. For us it's meant cutting down drastically on the local club sports (water polo), which has always been treated equally with the other school sports in the past. By the end of the season I had several complaints, but weeks only have so many hours in them :)
     
  2. Fredrick

    Fredrick Well-Known Member

    Think tankers don't like game stories anymore, even though they get zillions of names in the newspaper compared to a feature on a high school kid which has a limited audience. At our shop the solution is longer features and more of them and the same amount of game coverage. And yes no overtime. More bad decisions. The old model worked, folks. The DMN is proof of that. Old DMN ... great. New DMN a joke.
     
  3. golfnut8924

    golfnut8924 Guest

    At my previou stop, we had one staffer for every 2-3 schools in the heart of our coverage area. With us plus some stringers, we usually covered all but 2 or 3 football games for every school. We usually covered at least half of the basketball games for every school and at least half of the baseball, softball and soccer games for each school. Other sports (field hockey, track, swimming and stuff like that) were a little less frequent but I'd still estimate at least a quarter of those were covered for each team. During the summer, we covered the hell out of little league baseball. We're talking 8 and 9 year olds here. And on top of all of that was features, athlete of the weeks, roundups for games we didn't staff, etc.

    This was in small town America.

    I'd love to see some of these families who bitch about coverage move to a major metro area where -- unless they were football or basketball -- they would only get coverage if they made it deep into the state tournament.

    In terms of newspaper coverage for preps and youths, the small town people have no idea how lucky they are. Like I said before, I would've killed to have that kind of youth and high school coverage when I was growing up.
     
  4. albert77

    albert77 Well-Known Member

    I recently had a fan of one of our high schools make a telling on-line comment on a story I'd written: "Even bad coverage is better than no coverage."
     
  5. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    The principle I base my career on.
     
  6. Gator

    Gator Well-Known Member

    I think more than anything, and I know that a lot of you guys can agree, I hate the people who call and claim that we're covering one school more than the rest. I can assure that is never the case. Not only that, I try to go as far to see that niche sports such as swimming, gymnastics and wrestling get their due. The way I see it, everyone goes to practice everyday, everyone puts in the time, so they should get their ink. A season doesn't go by where we don't cover every single team at least once.

    Readers, however, fail to recognize that and it makes me want to stab all of them.
     
  7. HanSenSE

    HanSenSE Well-Known Member

    Ab-so-lutely! Especially on Fridays in the fall. We have a case where the two schools in town share a stadium, so there's at least one at home every week. Say Podunk has three straight away games, that usually means Podunk North is assigned for the main photo those weeks (unless Podunk is playing at rival Zilchville, maybe 10 miles away, then I'll dispatch the shooter there). All of a sudden, here come the calls wondering why I'm favoring Podunk North. But, wait a minute ... Podunk North starts an extended roadie, so Podunk gets the main shot for a couple of weeks. Or am I the only one who gets it?
     
  8. Appgrad05

    Appgrad05 Active Member

    A few years ago, I started hearing old guys talk at the city high school's basketball games about this kid who was killing it at the middle school. His coach would call in with a result every once in a while, and sure enough the kid would always have like 25 of his team's 29 points, or something like that. I went out and watched him play, and the middle school gym was sold out. He was 6-foot-3 or something like that then, and was just a man among boys. I talked to the coach, talked to him and after a couple of weeks, I sit down with the parents and really get the details. Turns out the kid has a bunch of offers to go to prep schools, and all three high schools (he lived in the bermuda triangle of the school district and could pick his school) have called and "recruited" him. I wrote it, and I wrote it big — 40 inches or so.
    Well, he's a senior now. He hasn't committed to college, but he has some offers. He ended up at the city school, and he's going to set the new school record for scoring, apparently (a sort of big deal, since two NCAA All-Americans and NBA Rookies of the Year went to the school). But the quietness that made him refreshing as an eighth-grader has never left him. No killer instinct. He has all the talent in the world, but no idea how to beat you with it. What I saw was correct — he was a kid with great talent and enormous potential. But it's impossible to see how they're going to develop.
     
  9. sgreenwell

    sgreenwell Well-Known Member

    I've only had experience with the opposite. I played Little League baseball in 7th, 8th and 9th grade with a tall, goofy-looking lefty, and he wasn't a dominant player by any means; he didn't play high school baseball his freshman year, and while he hit for some power (his two or three HRs led the league) he didn't seem to be a future superstar or anything.

    Flash forward to his junior and senior years, and he had thrown a couple no-hitters and got drafted by the Dodgers. He has had a couple arm surgeries since then, but still, it was a shocking thing for me to see, given that he was just marginally better than me in ninth grade. For comparison's sake, I never played a varsity sport, and only did a year of 10th grade and 9th grade freshman basketball.
     
  10. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Damon Bailey
     
  11. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    Damon Bailey was different. It wasn't his father talking him up (well, maybe he was, too), it was one of the most accomplished coaches in college basketball history. Obviously, Knight turned out to be wrong about Bailey, but you couldn't exactly blow off all the hype.
     
  12. Gator

    Gator Well-Known Member

    True ... if this father called me and he eventually ended up scoring 1,700 points for Indiana, I'd be thrilled. Instead, he couldn't score 17 points for his high school team.
     
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