How do you go about selecting All-Area/All-Bi-City teams other than football?

[JM22720]

Obviously there's no perfect way of doing it, but I'm curious as to how you all pick All-Area/All-Bi-City/etc. teams for sports that aren't as heavily covered.

 

[playthrough]

Informally poll the coaches. Obviously if the coach selects a bunch of his/her own players, take it with a grain of salt. For swimming, cross country, track, the times do the work for you.

When I worked at my last major metro, all the high school reporters would meet for lunch with our editor and we'd hash out all-area teams in the bigger sports. We covered a five-county area and there would be about 20 people around the table. Talk about the good old days.

 

[HanSenSE]

Use the all-league teams as a guide. Talk to coaches as well. Some will be like playthrough noted, pushing for their players, but most, in my experience, will give you an honest evaluation, especially in minor sports.

 

[Cybersport2015]

I rely on all-league teams although they can be taken with a grain of salt as well, sometimes there is a push to recognize seniors, especially those who haven't made a college selection. In soccer and ice hockey I have a group of coaches I can rely on for input, who won't go overboard pushing their own players.

 

[Tweener]

Use the all-league teams as a guide. Talk to coaches as well. Some will be like playthrough noted, pushing for their players, but most, in my experience, will give you an honest evaluation, especially in minor sports.

All-league teams out here in our area are a joke because there’s so much pettiness between the coaches. They can’t be trusted. I’d say find the guys you can trust and informally poll them.

 

[MeanGreenATO]

The advice for polling coaches you trust is the best idea. When all else fails, use the all-district/league/conference teams so you have some reasoning. Best way to do it is with collaboration from others, whether it's fellow coaches or a shop that still has multiple people doing preps (bless those places).

 

[Cybersport2015]

The advantage I have covering boys soccer is soccer coaches are generally pretty straightforward. I didn't play the game so there are a lot of things coaches will notice that I wouldn't, particularly when I'm in need of a quality defender or two to fill out the team

 

[Batman]

The advantage I have covering boys soccer is soccer coaches are generally pretty straightforward. I didn't play the game so there are a lot of things coaches will notice that I wouldn't, particularly when I'm in need of a quality defender or two to fill out the team

Soccer is insanely frustrating to pick. I can look at a stat sheet and see who led the team in goals, but that often is not their best player. In high school, especially on less-talented teams, coaches often use their best players on defense where there are practically no stats to measure things by.
For that reason, soccer is the one all-county team where I largely defer to our coaches. Our area player of the year is usually obvious. After that, I tell the coaches to tell me who they think was good enough to be in that category. We only have four teams and about 12 all-county spots, so most times it takes care of itself.

A similar approach works for our other sports, although I have a better sense of who deserves to be there.
For basketball I pick the best seven or eight and a player of the year. With so few schools, it's usually obvious which players are pretty good or at least contributed enough to be there, and which ones would be a stretch.
I break baseball and softball down by position (with generic IF and OF positions), which occasionally leads to some tough decisions, but you can add things like designated hitters or finagle people who pitch and hit to make it work.
Track and field is easy. Anybody who makes the state meet gets on the all-county team. If there are any spots left, you try to fill in missing specialties from the folks who reached the state semifinals.

 

[HanSenSE]

The advantage I have covering boys soccer is soccer coaches are generally pretty straightforward. I didn't play the game so there are a lot of things coaches will notice that I wouldn't, particularly when I'm in need of a quality defender or two to fill out the team

I felt the same when it came to picking water polo teams as well. I saw all our teams enough to know who the studs were, but when one didn't stand out for a POY, or I had a close decision, I'd check in with the coaches.

We used Batman's rule on wrestling as well: Make state, you're on the team. I'd fill out the other weights depending on their postseason.

 

[Sports Barf]

USA Today would tell you to just have an intern look to see what MaxPreps did and then change a few names here or there

 

[Tarheel316]

Informally poll the coaches. Obviously if the coach selects a bunch of his/her own players, take it with a grain of salt. For swimming, cross country, track, the times do the work for you.

When I worked at my last major metro, all the high school reporters would meet for lunch with our editor and we'd hash out all-area teams in the bigger sports. We covered a five-county area and there would be about 20 people around the table. Talk about the good old days.

Twenty people? How long ago was that?

 

[playthrough]

Twenty people? How long ago was that?

About 15-20 years ago. Sigh.

 

[Batman]

Our esteemed competition, a start-up web site claiming to be the "largest newspaper in town" despite not having a print product and web traffic numbers that are about a tenth of what we get, put out its all-county football team last week on the same day as ours.
In a town with four high schools, their offensive team had eight linemen, three quarterbacks, five running backs and three receivers. Their coach of the year was a junior high coach. Several names were flat-out wrong. Out of about 35 players overall on the team, they had "No photo available" tags for about half of them. Just a lazy, awful product all around.
And yet people were still telling them what a great job they did on Facebook. It makes me want to scream into a pillow.

 

[Tarheel316]

About 15-20 years ago. Sigh.

I figured it was at least that far back.

 

[Starman]

In my hometown area, "minor sports" are essentially played in secret. The "mid-size metro," where I worked for three years as a stringer in the 1980s, gets maybe a half dozen prep agate results per night during the sports seasons. Of course their page space has shrunk to nothing, so they'd have nowhere to put it if they got it.
They covered 52 schools BACK INNN MYYYY DAYYYYY, I think now because of consolidations and other factors they're probably down to about 40.
So among these 40 schools, the districts still each offering an average of about 10 varsity sports per gender per year.
Little-bitty small-county schools may only offer 3-4 sports per gender, but the big metro area schools offer up to 16. Anyway overall I'd guess the average is about 10. So multiply that by two genders, by 40 schools, then subtract 80 boys' basketball and football teams which get most of the media coverage, and you still have roughly 720 varsity teams in the area; 200+ per season.
They get reports on maybe a couple dozen events per week.
Many teams now run their own team pages on Facebook or MaxPreps or the school district's own web page, etc etc, but I'd put that figure at probably 25%. Many or most of the pages on MaxPreps are several years out of date.
So bottom line, 90+ percent of the "minor" prep sports never get covered at all, by anyone.
Hell, for that matter, on football and basketball Fridays, because of a 9 p.m. deadline, they rarely get more than a couple games in anyway. And you can imagine how enthusiastic coaches are about calling in day-old results on Saturday, so in Sunday's paper they usually get capsule reports from maybe a dozen games or so, scores only on another 20 or so, and then nuthin' out of about 20.
The state HS athletic association does require football and basketball teams to send in their scores for playoff point purposes, so that's the default source if you need to know a team's WL record. Beyond that, good luck.

All-Area teams?!? (Jacking-off gesture.)

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

As God is my witness, I just sent this email to a local coach about the all-area boys soccer team:

Coach, this is an All-Pixley County team, not an All-Hooterville team. There are a lot of fantastic players on your team, but there are also others on the other teams in the county. I'm sorry you feel this way, but there are other players in the county who excel at the classification they are at. That is our main criteria for selection. We want everyone in the county represented. If we stuck with just the best players in the county they'd all be from Hooterville and Pixley. That's not very inclusive to the whole county, and as an educator you should at least appreciate the concept of inclusion. I should also note that you are a finalist for Coach of the Year. Thanks, Twirley

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

Obviously there's no perfect way of doing it, but I'm curious as to how you all pick All-Area/All-Bi-City/etc. teams for sports that aren't as heavily covered.

At my final stop, we didn’t. The coaches would vote their all-conference and all-state picks (the coaches association didn’t allow them to vote for their own players) and we’d do stories off that, but we weren’t trying to come up with the All-Circulation Area teams ourselves.

It was awesome.

 

[ChrisLong]

You need to decide if you want a true all-area team or if every school has to be represented. One year we did all-area basketball and put on the best player from the smallest school. Honestly, the guy was pretty good, but if we took 5 guys from the newsroom we would have beaten that team. One coach called and said, "I know why you chose that kid, but he couldn't even have made our team."

 

[PaperClip529]

You need to decide if you want a true all-area team or if every school has to be represented. One year we did all-area basketball and put on the best player from the smallest school. Honestly, the guy was pretty good, but if we took 5 guys from the newsroom we would have beaten that team. One coach called and said, "I know why you chose that kid, but he couldn't even have made our team."

That illustrates the biggest problem we had with our all-area teams. Are you honoring the best players or the best seasons? Does the top player on a small-school state champion deserve a spot more than the State U commit at the big school who was bounced in the first round of his playoffs? Does the McDonald’s All-American from the area win the POY award without a vote?

I favored the best seasons. That was not always a popular decision.

 

[stix]

Do your best, put together a good spread and most importantly, don’t ever engage coaches or parents who complain about them.

I’ve stopped spending much time on these. I use the all-conference teams and ask coaches if I need input. I have a good group of coaches now who understand all I have to do and are just happy we do them.

Im doing all-decade teams with everything off right now. Pretty easy, just have to use the archives. I’m blowing it out. Why not? I’ve got time and space.