Here's my own story, and my apologies for the length.
As you know, I work at a small daily. We've covered George Mason all season: every home game, perhaps a road game or two, off-day features, their CAA tournament run, nearly the whole deal. We did not cover their NCAA tournament game because it was three-quarters of the way across the country; we would have gone to anything remotely close - DC certainly, Raleigh probably, perhaps even Birmingham or Tampa.
In the meantime, I applied for credentials for the first and second round at Verizon Center. Georgetown is the host school there; we have not and do not cover Georgetown in any capacity. We were turned down. I felt this was in error, since - after careful reading of the criteria - I felt we qualified on multiple counts, so I e-mailed the contact person.
He said he turned us down because he had not ever seen us at a Georgetown game. Unfortunately, the NCAA's online credential process gave us no place to indicate to him that we in fact did cover basketball, just not Georgetown basketball - which, by my reading, was perfectly acceptable.
In order, these are the criteria listed by the NCAA:
"1. A daily agency with circulation greater than 60,000, a weekly with circulation greater than 500,000 or a monthly with circulation greater than 750,000 will be identified as 'national media' and will qualify for credentials."
This is not us. Our circulation is well short of that.
"2. An agency that does not meet Criteria No. 1 qualifies for credentials if a full-time staff member has covered at least 90 percent of the participating institutions regular-season home games and each of its games in the NCAA championship. (Covering all of the institutions competition in a different NCAA championship fulfills the latter requirement.) Such an agency can receive one more than the number of credentials it used for a majority of the institutions home games."
Here's where my confusion came in. 'Participating institution' is kind of vague; does that mean host school (i.e., Georgetown)? Does it mean George Mason, which qualified for the tournament? Or does it mean Duke, West Virginia, Arizona etc. - the teams that actually played in D.C.? I eliminated the third reason because I was working off the forms that dealt with credentials for a certain site, regardless of who was playing. A school's beat writers get their credentials through that school.
The first two options are essentially the same. Georgetown was also a participating institution but obviously wasn't at the same site it was hosting.
Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong. Regardless, I thought we qualified on the third criteria.
"3. A daily newspaper that is located in the market of a host institution but does not meet Criteria No. 1 qualifies for credentials if it covers college basketball on a daily basis (i.e., full-time staff members cover games several nights each week.)"
We are clearly in the DC market; that's the simple part. Do we cover several games several nights each week? No, but the one school we cover doesn't play several nights a week. They played twice a week; we covered usually once, maybe twice a week all season. If that's a way to weed out the little guys, so be it.
I made all of this clear in my first e-mail to the contact at Georgetown (his first reply was when he said why he denied us). In a follow-up e-mail, he said he would revisit the situation. A third e-mail from him, which I received on Wednesday, asked me to get in touch with him on Friday and he would try to squeeze me in for Saturday games.
I did as he asked; no dice. I could go if I wanted, but he wouldn't be able to get me a seat in the courtside press area - which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing. Too much media already, he said.
So my day off was cancelled and here I am in the office. I had planned to be working tomorrow, but I guess I'll be lounging around the house instead.
