Spring sports tab is off to the printer

I don't mind doing them for all sports seasons, but here in New England, the seasons run too close together. Hockey ended barely a week ago, and baseball was supposed to start today.

Fall is the only one we do now, only because there's so much time to collect the information/pictures. We generally try to get all the info for spring and winter teams, and run capsules around a feature story.

 

Isn't everywhere?

Before school starts there is football, soccer and cross country. Before football season is over girls and boys hoops has started.
The week of the girls state tourney softball, baseball and tracvk season have started. We have baseball and softball teams playing the week of the boys state tournament.

 

The public loves them, or so they say. But if they are that popular, you would think advertisers would jump all over it.

 

One thing that is good about the "backwardness" of the Kansas State High School Activities Association is that fall, winter and spring seasons have absolutely no overlap. In the fall, there is a manditory "buffer week" for the schools that aren't deep in the football playoffs — no coaching allowed, period.

The closest thing to an overlap that could happen is that the 11-man football state championship games come four days before the first day basketball teams are allowed to play. But that only affects 10 schools in the entire state each year.

Oh, and we don't do a spring tab. Never have and I'll do my best to make sure we never will. The spring sports starting dates are too far apart. It's easier just to do previews in the main edition as each sport comes up.

 

Fossy is my hero.

 

Same here and I like that. Helps the players, too. Even at the larger schools, many students play multiple sports and it would create a huge competitive disadvantage if one season were to start too closely on the heels of another season.

We have about a 2 week break before first official games are allowed and even then most schools don't play on the first day but backload their schedules. This is especially true in the spring, when March weather can include wind, rain, hail and even snow.

 

If the ad reps are anything like us on the news side, they've been working their asses off too???

I was asked about doing one of these by our ME earlier last month. I said I thought it would be great for football, but the ad side would have to commit to it, i.e., no backing out at the last moment because they couldn't sell Shinola. Last fall we went out to each school in our area, shot practices, got interviews and had about a couple of week's worth of centerpieces. All-sports tabs are nice in small markets, ie a couple of schools, but more than that don't think it's worth the effort unless you have teams that are consistent playoff contenders.

Winter and spring? We didn't have a chance to even do season previews, thanks to long playoff runs and being short-staffed, just tried to do "meet the team" type stories for each team's openers.

 

If ... the public loves them

and

if ... you don't sell ads for them

why not run pages through the week for a daily or over a couple weeks for a weekly.

It gives readers an extra reason to pick up the paper except for that one Sunday.

And maybe you could get an anchor advertiser to buy an smallish ad for each day or something.

Sure, folks love to see their kid's name and photo in the paper, but that section fossy described sounds mind-numbing.

 

God, how I wish Texas would do something like this. Most of the time one sport ends just days before the next one starts compting after a month or more of preseason pratice and scrimmages. It was a pleasant surprise this year when the UIL calendar had a full week of volleyball playoffs before the start of girls basketball and a week of football playoffs before the start of boys basketball, but the first girls basketball games were just two days after the last regular-season football games.

There have been times where a football team ended its season on a Friday and many of the same athletes were playing basketball games the following Monday or Tuesday.

This fall, we had seven area football teams in the fifth round of the playoffs, which was the second weekend of December. Several schools were starting their district basketball schedules at the same time.

Of course, it gets much worse for spring sports. The first softball games are the same date girls basketball playoffs begin. Same thing for baseball and boys basketball a week later.

Then there's squeezing in sports like soccer, which runs from the first week of January to the first week of March with playoffs starting in mid-March just days after the state basketball tournament, not to mention swimming and wrestling, which hold their district meets in early February.

And that doesn't even take into account non-UIL sanctioned sports like gymnastics, rodeo, lacrosse or hockey that have their own governing organizations.

As for the concept of seasonal sports tabs, I once worked at a place that did fall, winter and spring in addition to all the special sections newsside did. We averaged a special section every two weeks and there was hardy any advertising because as soon as one came out, the ad folks were hitting up businesses for the next one.

Other than timing, sports wasn't too bad because we only covered three schools that competed in a total of about 13 sports (most of them in the spring, naturally). At my present place, it's more than 70 high schools, five colleges and a couple of JuCos that compete in nearly two dozen sports. There's no way it could be pulled off with a five-man staff while still covering the ongoing sports.

 

Football only, and if sales don't pick up this year, that one might go away too, which will not break my heart.

I'd rather do a countdown type of thing in August previewing one area school per day in the regular paper. Give people a reason to buy a paper the whole month instead of waiting till tab day.

 

The city's basketball teams go to Missouri every season for a season-opening tournament. One year, the boys' first-round opponent (from Arkansas) had no choice but to send their JV. Their football team was still in the post-season (semifinals or finals, I can't remember which now) and the basketball team couldn't send any of their expected starters. I think they might have had only two others available who would normally be varsity players.

 

One of our little private schools had that happen. I asked the basketball coach how he was going to handle it, since 10 hoops players were also on the football team.

"Easy," he said. "First half is tryouts, second half we play."

I looked it up. His team won 74-33.