Spring sports tab is off to the printer

Our spring sports tab headed off to the printer a few hours ago and comes out Sunday.
Eight schools, so there are 16 track teams, eight baseball teams, eight softball teams and one tennis team (each with a team picture), plus a feature.
Anyone else publish one?

 

Nope. We just do a series of previews in the daily editions. I'm sure if advertising could sell enough ads, we'd do one.

What I've found from past experience is that the staff spends so much time doing these things that very few stories get written for the live paper during that period.

But, congratulations on getting it completed.

 

If you don't want to do one, don't tell the ad department this:
We publish three sports tabs a year (fall, winter and spring) and give our advertisers a discount if they go in all three. The contracts start in the fall with the school year.

 

You only cover the other 15 tennis teams when they lose.

 

we did my first year at my current shop (2006) ... we barely had enough room to run the team pics of all the teams (we had to put the schedules in the actual paper because they didn't fit) ... idea was killed in 2007 and beyond ...

i like the idea of doing an end-of-year tab, with all sorts of all-area teams/athletes of the year/senior superlatives/sports year in review stuff, etc. but that idea hasn't caught on here for that ... maybe it wouldn't sell, i don't know. it seems more interesting to me because it would be a forever keepsake...

 

Ha.
Actually, only one school (thankfully) has tennis. Cuts down on me covering a sport I know nothing about.

 

My first job was one of those do-it-all gigs where you had to cover and shoot everything (which happens more often than not these days).

Tennis wasn't only painful to cover, but good God it was a bitch and a half to shoot – especially with a shitty camera and a bogus lens.

We ran a lot of serve photos that spring.

 

I do OK with the photos, but a proper camera with a good lens helps. I just don't understand the scoring for tennis, and boys and girls teams at the one school with tennis haven't been mediocre, let alone good, since before I got here in the mid-1990s, so there hasn't been a reason to 'cover' a match.

 

You've been in sports journalism for 15 years and you've never covered a tennis match. I don't know if I am more shocked to know that or that you don't know how to score a match!!!

 

As long as you can avoid a third set deuce in front of car lights at 10 p.m. you're probably Ok.

 

We have done one for years ... About 50 pages, which is not enough.
We end up writing 6-inch briefs on each schools' baseball, softball, track and tennis teams. Aside from our four main schools, everybody else gets one page that includes rosters and schedules.
Photos? A mugshot or two but that's it.
And we have very little advertising for it. I am really suprised we have continued to print it the last three years.

It is easily the worst sports product we put out all year.

 

I really fail to understand why papers continue to produce these things if they don't sell ads for them.