Swim parents *rolls eyes* aye, aye, aye

Did you name the flip-flopper or towel tosser?

 

You can never win, really, so just stick to your guns and be professional in dealing with people, no matter how insane they are.

One of my favorite ones I recall came when I decided to break one of my regular rules. Generally, I didn't do a lot of stories featuring or quoting athletes who weren't at least high school age — my theory was let them enjoy the game, and while reporting stats from the game, focus more on the team.

Anyway, one year, we had a novice (aged 7-9) rep hockey player who scored 100 goals by Christmas. I'd covered hockey for several years and never really had one of these guys in my back yard. So, I went out and talked to him. He was a really quiet and shy kid, very unassuming, and his parents were the same. Good little feature on the silent sniper.

I started to get e-mails from these other parents on different teams, "We beat them," "Johnny's better" etc. so I said, show me the stats. The kid was nowhere close, but their annoying e-mails took up a fair bit of my time.

 

I think write then drink brings up a really good point. My first thought was that this is an editing concern. Stories can't leave questions open. So if you say these two kids, who live in Town A, go to Town B to train, just let them say it's because they wanted to train with an Olympian, or whatever.

I edit, and too often I see writers filing stories with information that -- as write then drink observed -- calls for a rebuttal from someone else, yet there is no rebuttal. And worse, there's no mention that the reporter attempted to obtain a rebuttal. We gloss over that sort of stuff far too often.

If these kids said, we hate that club and the people who run it are disorganized, you owe that other club the chance to respond. The thing is, if you think about it, a lot of times those things can be left out without really taking anything away from the story you're trying to tell -- especially on local-yokel rec/club/prep stuff. By the time you track down the rebuttal and add it to the story, you ended up adding a few inches of he-said, she-said nonsense that will end up being the first thing cut when the story doesn't fit the hole on the page. Which it won't, thanks to everyone's rapidly shrinking space.

I'm not saying don't go after these juicy, confrontational storylines, but just be able to separate the good ones that are worth pursuing from the ones that don't matter.

 

Well said, Hacker. We get far too many of these one-person interview features. The other day I had one that was pitched as a broad-stroke piece about the costs of traveling to junior tournaments, time, money, etc. It ended up being about one kid, whose skill level didn't justify a feature, and there was one quote in the story from the kid. The rest was his father, "We this, ... we that ... " When I pointed out to the ASE that the story didn't come close to matching the budget line, he shrugged and said it was the best we could do on one day, that the story didn't merit more time.

My impulse then and there would have been to kill it and fill the space with some wire feature. But don't you know we are "local, local, local" these days.

 

I'm really glad I'm not the only person thinking along those lines. Our SE wrote a feature - Sunday CP, actually - that was one-sourced and, let's hope to God, the kid was truthful.

Some kid graduates from HS, goes to France to play for some Ligue 2 team. Second graf, the writer makes mention of this ultimate dream of his: to play professional soccer.

Except now that he's back here, trying to get into the local D-1 school. It seems the contract the French team offered "wasn't near enough for what I'd done for the club," the kid said.

So if this was the greatest dream of his life, why did the money matter so much?

I don't know either. The story sure didn't tell me.

 

One year, I had a girls' basketball team that went 0-21. One parent actually called and used the "You only cover us when we lose" line.

I had to let it sink in for a second but the temptation to say "That's because all you do is lose!" was oh, so hard to resist.

 

Sounds like one girls' team in my area.

Can't remember if they've had an 0-for the season year recently, but one parent tried to pull that line on me after I covered a game in which they lost by 60-plus points to another school we cover.

 

Nothing bugs me more than parents of a losing team whining about more coverage. "Hey, Mom, do you REALLY want us to glorify every loss of your kid's team?"

 

I covered a football team last year that was 0-11. What a glorious season that was. Most of the time, when I went for post-game interview with the coach, he had yelled so much he had almost no voice, so I had fun trying to understand him.

And as for the swim parents thing, I have another story to throw in. We had Bitchy Country Club Mom e-mail us about the horrific lack of coverage of the kiddie country club swim team. BCCM apparently fails to realize that: A-we're not telepathic. We don't know when your practices and meets are if you don't inform us. The other swim team with the YMCA has no problem with e-mailing us when they go somewhere and giving us a brief overview of what the team does, and likewise, we have no problem putting them in the paper. E-mailing us after the season is over to bitch about how we never give you coverage is probably not going to help you get in the paper. Letting us know during the season might actually accomplish more.

But then, that would be applying logic, and these people have none.

I've never been so happy to be starting up high school again. I've heard more bitching, whining, complaining and yelling from youth sports parents (especially Little League parents) than I ever get from high schoolers parents.

 

How does the kid play D-I soccer when he already turned pro, or was he just on a tryout? And he's not the great if he can't even hook on with a college team, unless he's an idiot who can't get in.

 

Word. Like strollers and dogs at Eastern Market, country club sports are the bane of my existence.

 

This is exactly my problem with both the swim team and the American Legion baseball program that apparently was revived this year. I haven't, not once in 12 years, been given a season schedule for the swim team.

The only person who told me about the A.L. program was a person who used to work for us a while back. I told him, "Then you know that I'm not covering one single game without a schedule. Tell the coach to call me."

So, of course, the coach never called and when former co-worker called to complain about no coverage, I reminded him I asked him to call the coach and have him get in touch with me. He says that's my job. So I tell him, "You want me to call the coach? I will. Tell me who he is!"

Obviously, I didn't cover the Legion program this season.