"You don't support us ..."

Yes, I'm in a similar spot and admit that it irks me when parents or kids will ask where I'm from, then I tell them and get the "Oh, we thought you were with the big newspaper" disappointment.

Hey, guess what, I'm here. We're covering you guys. Meanwhile, big-city daily is doing a feature on a member of the NBA team 3,000 miles away that happens to be in town tomorrow night.

 

"I really hope you could get this in for tomorrow's paper."

"We'll do our best."

"If you could just try and get this in, I'd really appreciate it."

"We're going to try. It should be in, but if not, it will be in Wednesday for sure."

"OK, but if you could just really try..."

WE'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRY! NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP!

 

Which is where 80 percent of prep coverage should go ... (okay, maybe 50 percent) ....

 

No, Dan, I think 80 percent is right on the money. Once you're past football and basketball I don't think there's an interest -- not even a silent, non-attending-but-still-wanting-to-read-about-the-team level of interest. Only the parents care, and think of the effort and column inches that go into appeasing that small number of people. On second thought, don't think about it. Makes me cringe.

 

what frosts me is the "that's the way we've always done it" way of thinking, even as the ship is sinking ... as a parent (of six, all grown, now), I have a problem with lionizing the prepsters. And to be honest, I'm not sold on the notion that high schools should be in the sports business (I am of a mixed mind on that issue, but still ... ) ... this from one who has written literally thousands of high school stories ... I do know that before I got into this biz, I was a voracious sports page reader, but rarely if ever read a story about h.s. sports, and absolutely never bought a paper to read one ....

 

You better not speak such heresy. People who have been in the business longer than you are right, and you are always wrong. Any attempt to think otherwise will get you called a whipper-snapper and looked upon with disdain.

 

Ahhh ... the frightfully unaware tennis coach. Must be in a lot of towns.

I ended up being the grease for our squeaky-wheeled tennis coach some years ago. Even barked about the soccer team getting more coverage.

It was all the SE, who put me on this, and the ASE could do not to laugh. Worse for the tennis coach, the ASE, anything but a pro-soccer sort when he heard the soccer complaint, went "well ... first time for that one" as well as "the soccer team actually gets more people to show than tennis."

He was right. Some time later, we staffed a playoff match that attracted maybe a couple dozen souls. Made sure to put that in the story, too ... hadn't laughed that hard in a long, long time.

 

From both the news side and the sports side, I feel like more often I'm getting calls/e-mails from organizations and businesses asking me to do a story "just telling people we're still here." I understand they're frustration, but it's getting kind of annoying. We're not the damn Chamber of Commerce, trying to boost you whenever we can. Anyone else getting calls like this?

 

Semi-Pro Football Teams:

How do you guys go about covering these? Do you at all? Would you be willing to throw them into Monday's lackluster papers?

This team has quite a few local talents (local high school stars) as well as 31 players who played in college (10 of whom played at the FBS level).

Since semi-pro football has been mentioned here, I thought I would take advice.

 

I've had to cover a couple semi-pro football teams in my time. The best way I have approached it was by featurizing the players on the team. One player worked as a bouncer at a club in Hollywood. He had some interesting stories. One player spent some time in the CFL and still had the itch to play football when he moved to LA. Find an interesting story and work in how the team is doing. It's not worth it to do game coverage. I got the feeling some of the players didn't care if their team won or lost. I doubt there was much of a following outside of the team's families and friends.

 

For us, there's not too much going on in the summer, so we cover their games. They do, actually, get a pretty good crowd every game. So we give 'em a decent season preview, short game previews, gamers and the random feature every now and then.

Our readers have shown enough interest over the last couple years to keep it up.

As others have said, though, interest isn't always very high for these guys. Maybe our situation is rare.

 

This particular team plays in literal Podunk. One team actually said the place could make a great setting for a Deliverance remake.

However, they draw an average of 450 fans per game.