Why "preps" when talking about public schools?

Prep schools are private schools generally geared towards prepping the students for college. Public schools and religious schools don't fit under that definition.

Yet many papers refer to "prep sports" instead of "high school sports" in print. Isn't this essentially foisting newspaper jargon -- and inaccurate jargon in most cases -- on our readers?

I couldn't care less what people in the newsroom say as short-hand, but that's one blatant inaccuracy that's bugged me for a while when I see it in print.

(Oh, and what were the green eye shades for back in the day?)

 

Because all high schools, ostensibly, are preparatory for the next level?

 

Yeah. Every high school's curriculum is essentially college preparation.

 

And because "Secondaries" is just way too long.

 

If you asked that question in my office, the answer would be: "You're right, now shut the f*** up."

 

They're just high school sports in New Jersey.
Not a single paper refers to it as "preps" coverage.

 

In each of the three states I've reported, no paper has ever labeled a section: Prep Baseball, etc. I've only heard it in the office.

 

Like with most newspaper slang, I think it has everything to do with size.

At my old gig, we used Preps because it was shorter than High Schools. In every sports story, there would be a reverse bar noting what kind of story it was -- those reverse bars were designed to be kinda small, so we could never fit "High School Volleyball" but "Prep Volleyball" fit just fine.

 

Same here, but as we talk about this, it occurs to me that "H.S. Volleyball" would fit about the same.

 

We don't have any prep schools in our area, so I always write high school. My editor calls it preps simply to annoy the shit out of me.

When I worked on the news side, I dealt in perps, not preps.

 

We call them high school sports at the behest of our ME. We joke about it around the office, but heads will roll if "prep" runs in print instead of "high school."

 

I graduated from a "private" high school. It was not, by an definition, a "prep" school.

It was a high school and the words high school were in the name. Now that I think of it, in our coverage area we had more public schools that were "college prep schools" than we did private.