Tips on Covering High School Basketball

Does anybody here have to cover girls/boys doubleheaders?
How do you handle it if one or both of the coaches from the first game hold a long team meeting after the game?
Do you want them out regardless of how long they take? At what point do you give up and go back to cover the second game?
By the way, about those long team meetings: Is there ever really anything that needs to be ironed out right then and there? Isn't that why they have practice?

 

All of our games are like that. Typically, we feature one game (10-12 inches) and summarize the other (3-6 inches).
I'll usually copy the boys rosters between games and track down the girls coaches at halftime, unless it's obvious that I'm leading with the girls game. It's pretty much hit the high notes and move on. By the time I add up stats and find the coach the clock is down to about five minutes. If I can't find them by the 3-minute mark I give up.

 

The girls basketball coach around here is notorious for holding the long meetings. I'll wait until the second game starts, but I'm not missing any part of it for him. I'll either track him down at halftime of the boys game or they just get a "Coach Podunk was unavailable for comment."

 

Just about every time out in Kansas (except maybe the KC area) is a boy/girl doubleheader. If the girls' coach doesn't come out right after the game, I know he'll be on the radio at halftime of the boys' game. I hold my tape recorder up near the radio mike during the interview. A lot of the time, the band is playing or the dance team is performing and I can't hear everything he says (along with the fact that my hearing has declined a bit in the past few years), so fresh batteries are my only hope for getting a quote under the circumstances.

 

All games in Arkansas are doubleheaders with girls playing first. After the girls game I wait for the scorebook to be tallied up and copy and names from the book I may have missed. I'll make my way over to locker room and if the coach isn't out by the 2 minute mark before the boys game he gets to wait till halftime. Most of our coaches here know the drill. Girls gamer is usually shorter than the boys, unless I'm leading with the girls which can happen late in a season if the boys team is really bad and the girls are good. If you take a computer write during timeouts, quarter breaks or whenever the clock stops. I was lucky enough not to have a super tight deadline, so I generally had enough time after the boys game to hack out a decent gamer and read over it before sending it in.

 

A lot of teams in my area have strayed from boy/girl doubleheaders in recent years. Used to be an almost every night type deal, now they mostly happen on Fridays if they happen at all.

 

I wish they played basketball once a week in the fall instead of football. I can churn out a 15-incher and often be gone before the visitors' bus pulls out. Football is a bit more involved because of the stats.

The only advice I can add to what's been stated is, try to talk to the kids. You will probably get a better perspective on the game from them. Too many people just rely on coaches' quotes and to me, that's poor sourcing.

I keep all my own stats, except I'll check with the team for assists. That's just one task too many for me.

Around here, different districts do their own thing when it comes to scheduling girls and boys games. Some districts play boys at home and girls on the road, and vice versa; some play doubleheaders; and others do a mix where natural rivals play doubleheaders and out-of-town games are split.

Mostly it's the bigger schools that split up boys and girls, because travel costs aren't as big a percentage of the budget, and it guarantees a home game every night. If we're covering a doubleheader, we'll identify which game is the more important one and lead with that one. Girls basketball is pretty big here, especially in the smaller schools.

 

I rarely use a coach quote (I do talk to them, though), and I will almost never lede with one ... almost always build my lede from the player's perspective ... I go minimal on the stats (I like a lot of others, do make it a point to write out the final score), dont keep track of shots or assists (I'm not a hoop junkie writing for other hoop junkies), and generally dont talk to the other side if it's an out of coverage area school ... that's what works for me ... the other variable is that we take pics as well as write ... more challenging in hoops than in any other sport (except maybe cross country, it's hard to keep ahead of the runners and snap at the same time) ...

 

There is some really, really good stuff here!

A few things I'm curious on:

-A lot of you guys mentioned play-by-play. Does this work okay? I always felt that if I would keep a play-by-play sheet by head would be down the entire time and I may miss some things.

-I write for a local newspaper, covering one team. Do you still think it's a good idea to not write the story in chronological order, and instead hit the big points first, and then fill in the details?

Thanks!

 

Greg,
Play-by-play can be tricky because, as you said, you can end up with your nose in your notebook all night instead of watching the game. The key, I think, is to develop a shorthand system that allows you to write quickly. It certainly takes some practice.

Even for a newspaper covering one team, I would avoid the chronological presentation of the game. Every game has a turning point, a key player, some sort of trend, or some other underlying story line. I would explore those angles rather than a chronological writeup.

 

When I covered preps, my boxes had individual shooting (including free-throws and 3s), individual rebounds and team turnovers. I had a good system (I wish I still had the sheet I used) and it wasn't that hard.

 

The "play-by-play" that gets in your story might be that Podunk went on a 15-0 run in the second quarter with Johnny Jones scoring 12 in that stretch.

So if you keep scoring in a "play-by-play" format, you can glean things like that out of it. A little goes a long way. If you rely on it to fill out your story, your story will be deadly dull.

Also good to write the times for scores down at least some of the time. That way you can say that Podunk overcame a 10-point deficit in the final 2:30 or that Joe Blow sank the winning basket with 3 seconds left.

You definitely do not want to write the story chronologically.

Best information is what people say about the game, who had the top stats and the flow of the game. Plus any surprises -- kid on end of bench scores 15 points or player subbing for injured star has 14 rebounds. Things like that.