Taxpayers deserve JV coverage.

Once every season, I get the "Our JV/freshman/middle school team his having a great season, why don't you do an article about them?" e-mail or call.
Judging by the frequency of these threads, I'm sure a lot of us get that call or e-mail.
If I only had to cover one high school, I might consider it. I cover five high schools, with anywhere between 6 and 15 varsity teams playing each season and anywhere between 30 and 40 varsity teams between the five high schools put together. I have my hands full with that and I have yet to figure out a way to cover them all in a way that would please everyone. It's probably impossible to do that.
If I decided to do that subvarsity article, it would just give more ammunition to the people who think I'm shortchanging their kids' teams. "You have time to cover the JV football team, but not varsity swimming?"
If I decided to cover JV teams that were having "great seasons" I'm sure the bar for what qualifies as a great season would keep getting lower and lower. You'd start out with a team that was undefeated, maybe even undefeated for several years. Then somebody would make a good case for a team that lost a game or two, but won a league title (even if there is no official league title at the subvarsity level). Then it's a team that had a winning record, then a team that won its first game after several winless seasons, then a bunch of good kids who worked really hard.
Eventually, you'd have no choice but to cover all of them.
If somebody wants to send in a brief article and maybe even a photo of one of those teams having a "great year" I'll use it. Of course sometimes the readers can't tell the difference between what the staff writes and what people send us, but once I explain these things to people usually they understand that the line needs to be drawn somewhere.

 

I haven't heard from either of them since, but I'm sure our publisher has heard from the father, who doesn't let go of anything.

 

This.

Next time a caller bitches about JV coverage, tell him/her that you'll start covering JV games when the state association starts holding JV playoffs and crowning a JV state champion.

 

Or when anyone who doesn't have a kid on the team attends a JV game.

 

The Deseret News had an article about coaches lying about JV records. I guess a lot of varsity coaches say that their JV squad was undefeated. A statistically impossibility.

 

Nobody has addressed this yet I don't think, but have you ever tried to get quotes of substance from a second-grader? I don't think so. If so, you would know that they are going to be worse than middle-schoolers. Those kids have the giggles, they have the shyness, they have the yes and no answers for open-ended questions. They are the worse people to interview. The kids may be great, but a feature about them would be mainly a coach-centered article, and that is just lame if you want it to be about this kids.
This is why I quit doing that stuff, it's not worthwhile in the end and only the parents care.

 

Or ask them if they'll mind, in two years when their kid is playing varsity, that the varsity news hole gets slashed to cover JV.

 

One of the most painful professional experiences I had was covering youth league all-star baseball. Those kids didn't have a clue what to say. I might as well have been the Spanish Inquisition.

 

This.

 

But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

 

Tell these "I'm a taxpayer" people to go pound sand up their assholes.

Go complain to your city councilman, if you want, because he's the one getting your tax money, not me. If that doesn't work, give me some reason why anybody in this community cares about your event, or leave me alone.

 

Let's not forget that other all-time classic: "You know, the varsity is having a really bad year, but the JV is undefeated, so maybe you should build them up more, since people want to know about next year's team."