The horrors of school statkeepers

Some guys are horrible, but I have also run across guys that had stats very close to mine, if not dead on. There are one or two guys around our area that if they say a kid had 15 tackles, you can bank on it being the truth.

 

Our junior high results go in the briefs in a paragraph form -- couple sentences listing who beat who and one or two high scorers. No agate.

All of our high school games get box scores, listing everyone who played. Of course, that's if the coaches send it in properly. We still get boxes sent in listing only players who scored.

We also have an area mom who can't understand why we don't list her kid in a box score when said kid doesn't play.

 

If I cover a high school game, the only stats I trust are mine. The only exception is with volleyball and even then, there are some coaches who give out "hockey assists" and skew the numbers.

 

I haven't covered a high school game in almost three years now (miss it to be honest...tried to pick up some stringing gigs at the end of football, but it didn't work out) but when I did I generally was like you with a couple of exceptions. I would defer to the accountant mentioned earlier in the thread. We were always off by a yard or two at the end in our stats (often right on the money in some categories, and off a yard or so in several others) and I would defer to him just to simplify his job, especially considering how well he got his stats to us...even sent us a weekly press release (a press release from an accountant is four pages of raw data, ha.).

 

The poster asked if there was a definitive answer to how to do a box score. There is. I shared it with you. It's not nit-picky, it's convention.

Whether you choose to publish it that way or do something differently is up to you and your publication. There's no law that says you have to follow AP style, but there is indeed a common and consistent format for basketball agate.

As far as your question goes, no, I'm not publishing a middle school box score for love nor money. But if I'm taking a varsity call-in -- and fortunately I don't do that anymore -- yes, I'm asking for every person who played. And, yes, we'd run the box full. It's documentation of the game. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

 

Most times, they run in the order they're entered in the sccorebook. Makes it easier when I'm looking over the scorer's shoulder or reading it from the other side of the scorers' table after the game. That's also the way they're read to us on phone-ins. And may the style police have mercy on my soul.

 

Definitely.

I covered a kid once who had no athletic ability whatsoever other than being able to shoot jumpers. He was the high school Matt Bullard.

Either defenses guarded him and he didn't score or they left him alone and helped on other players and he drained three-pointers.

He once had a four game stretch where he scored 24, 0, 27 and 3 points. I shit you not.

 

If it works for you, that's great. Like I said, I'm not losing sleep over how some publication decides to print a box score. I've even seen some newspapers list the players in descending order of points scored. Whatever serves your readers best, go for it. But the query was if there's a standard, widely accepted method for compiling a basketball box for publication ... and there is.

 

It's not limited to students. I PA announce and run the individual scoreboard for my wife's school. The adult who sometimes keeps the book, a teacher at the school, misses who made a shot 75% of the time because she's busy doing something else. Drives me crazy.

 

No argument there, hack. As they say on TV, your mileage may vary. Most folks wouldnt know AP style if you winged them with the book. But spell little Sammy Slamdunk's name wrong or mess up his scholarship by saying he had one point when he had two ...

 

That's for darned sure. When it came to call-ins, back in the day, we did what we could to ask the right questions to make the box as consistent as possible. Sadly, we had to do the same thing for more than a few of our writers.

One thing that helped was, before the season began, giving the coaches a flier (or a fax or an e-mailed PDF) that showed a proper, full box score, complete with USA Today-style graphic arrows and breakouts, explaining what we need for a call-in (and why and how). It wasn't perfect, but it kept the idiot level down somewhat. And, again, sadly, more than a few of our writers carried the fliers around for their own reference.

That said, I'm glad I work in the magazine business now.

 

Fair enough