Should JV results be included?

Thanks to Ace for bringing us back on target.
I work at two newspapers, a weekly (8 high schools) and a daily (14 high schools, Division II college, Division III college).
At the weekly, JV results get a sentence or two at the end of the varsity roundup or story.
At the daily, JV results go in the sports briefs in paragraph form (again, a couple sentences) on the agate page.
At neither paper do we seek out or physically cover JV events. When covering a basketball game, we'll get the scores and info before taking down the rosters out of the varsity book. Otherwise all JV (and freshman sports) info is called, faxed or E-mailed in or dropped off.

 

This, I liked. And I especially liked the last sentence. It would do many well to read it again, and I'm not just talking about JV sports.

Swimming parents are hell on wheels? You've never met a soccer mom who has her child's sport in proper perspective? This freshman mother thinks her kid deserves an early feature story? OK. You're not the first journalist who had to deal with that.

But IF you ever let your disgust with a certain group of parents affect your judgment choices, you are not doing your job. And if you begin thumbing your nose at a certain group of parents, chances are you're alienating a section of your readership, too. They wouldn't be in your grill if they didn't read the paper, as I see it.

Like zimbabwe, I'm not saying we start running something because of the lunatic fringe's call for it. I'm saying we keep ourselves open and judge what kind of reader interest there is in ANYTHING, even the stuff we personally roll our eyes about.

Now ... JV scores? The 17,000 daily I started out with used to run JV boxscores on the football and girls' and boys' basketball -- but only for the city's school. They also ran linescores on the junior high schools -- but only for the city's two junior high schools.

It was a rather abrupt line in the sand, but it was established, and from all I can remember, there wasn't any bellyaching about it. It was just the line that was set down, and it was consistent.

You do what's right for you. And it may not be the same as what the nearest paper of like circulation might do.

 

+1, amigo.

(As I deal with a raving lunatic soccer mom this a.m.)

 

I have to agree with RickStain.

These JV athletes will be exposure when they get to Varsity Athletics.

There is very little athletics excellence at the JV level.

I've always thought of JV as the minor leagues of prep sports, the good ones will get a call to the show.

 

Well, in this week's issue, we have a JV story. The reason why is that the local team won a game 23-21 in softball. That's more than the nearby Seattle Mariners have had at SafeCo.

 

Coast Union, Cuyama Valley: "Amateurs."

 

Is that unusual for JV softball? I feel like it isn't, but then again, I can't say that I've seen many JV softball games. The two schools I've covered didn't have it since they barely had enough players to field a varsity.

 

My paper runs them. I don't really like doing it, becuase JV and middle school teams tend to suck at preparing boxscores or spelling in general and taking calls is a pain. That said, at a paper with certain combinations of space, staffing and a coverage area that's not too big, it seems like found money. Small allocations of space feed fanatical parents' interest. They in turn buy papers, or call later wanting extras for scrapbooks and such. Maybe it costs us chunks of a few AP stories, and that's not the most valuable thing out there.

On principle I dislike doing it, but in practice I end up oddly ambivalent. If we we had a massive coverage area, or very limited space, I'd probably feel more strongly.

 

+1

(Although we limit middle school to one day a week, the "community agate," and we do not accept middle school reports by phone. E-mail, fax or by-hand only).