The Atlantic: 'The case against high school sports'

Invite your salespeople (and Mr. Publisher) to come along with you to cover a girls sports event and volunteer to count the number of people in the stands who are not parents or siblings of the players.

If there are three of you (you, Ad Guy and Publisher Guy), you should have more than enough fingers between you to do it.

 

Again, that depends on where you are. I've seen large crowds at girls sporting events. It certainly isn't as common as it is for the boys, but it does happen more than you seem to think.

 

There are a number of those places in Texas. Duncanville comes to mind.

 

If there is substantial interest in the community at large, then go ahead and cover it.

Years ago, when girls basketball in our state was played in the fall, I used to catch heavy shit from football parents for devoting more total page space (they measured) to girls basketball (who played two games every week) than football (who played one).

They wanted girls basketball gamers cut down (or out) in order to make room for those ever-enthralling midweek football feature and preview stories.

(Makes furious jacking-off motion with hand and wrist)

: : :

 

As someone who has spent his career working mostly at local papers in smaller communities, my philosophy has been this: Focus on your local communities, it's fine to give top billing to the best teams in the area, but don't focus solely on the top teams at the expense of others.

The reason is this: That team that struggles to win games one season could become a team that is one of the better team in the area in a later season, so be sure to give them at least some coverage regardless of their success level.

With that said, I understand not everyone here works at a local paper in a smaller community. Therefore, figure out what your readers are more likely to be interested in and prioritize there.

But don't entirely ignore all the high school sports. It's fine if you expect the coaches to call to report the scores and that you may be limited to a box score much of the time, but if there is an interesting story developing with a local high school team, then find a way to cover it. You never know how many readers might find it interesting or say to themselves, "Hey, I just read Podunk High is playing well in (insert not-so-popular sport here), maybe I should go watch a game and see what it's all about."

 

And on the subject of school budgets.

To be fair to Boom, I don't think he was saying that special education budgets needs to be cut. He's just pointing out that what tends to consume the larger part of a budget isn't the "easy targets" in the budget.

Truth be told, most people know very little about how most school budgets work. As an example, people in one district I covered said the breakfast program should be cut to help the district save money. The problem is that the breakfast program is part of the school meal program, which is supposed to be self-supporting and has this federal money tied into it (mostly from the free and reduced lunch program), so if you cut from the meal program, your savings has to go back into the meal program and you can't use the savings elsewhere. Along those same lines, if the meal program loses money and you steer money from another fund to cover it, the state education department will be all over the district's case for doing so.