Covering youth sports

Yep, we wouldn't want to add new readers buying our product. Need focus attention to more sports at various levels. My 2 cents....

 

This.

 

I'm about two-thirds of the way through the book, will finish it tonight, but I don't remember that discussion being a big part of it other than the first chapter about the kid who is choosing between the high school and Olympic Development Program. (And the U.S. Soccer Federation eliminating that choice by mandating that ODP players skip high school competition entirely.) I'm conflicted about that situation and I don't think the ODP route is a good idea for most of those kids, but if they've gotten to that level, this book isn't really about them anyway.

It's about ...

... as well as the basketball discussion that you mention.

The author notes that 70 percent of kids are done with organized sports by age 13. The question is why? Maybe I'm just venturing too far into the territory of Things Were Better In My Day, but ... take basketball. At age 15 I was a 5-foot-10 slow small forward, which is not a great thing to be at a high school that routinely ranked in the state's top five and produced six Division I players in a six-year span. I was among the first cuts. Big shock. But every Catholic and Lutheran church in town had a CYO team, and the Salvation Army ran a league too. During high school I probably played 20-25 games a year of "organized" basketball. It never mattered that my "career" was going nowhere and we were so far below the level of the 30 best players in town who were playing for the two high schools. And when I got to college (INTRAMURALS BROTHER!!!!!!) and even now, I could go play and stay fit and make friends and not completely embarrass myself.

Baseball was the same deal. In a town of 50,000 people, we had enough interested players to make 12 teams of players aged 13 through 15. Most didn't play high school. And that doesn't happen anymore -- it's either the travel/HS prep circuit or done. In every sport, kids (and their parents) give up as soon as they believe they can't make the high school team.

The book isn't great. Certainly not the BEST THING EVER!!!! that I see some of friends saying. But it's a good book about the money, and the dropping of other sports (usually by demand of the club coach), and the idea that parents honestly think they're doing right by their kids but are whiffing.

Batman, these are the kinds of discussions going on around this book. Anyone involved in youth sports has gone through this even if they haven't read it.

 

By the time you fix the system your kid will be in college.

 

It is always interesting watching "journalists" and "reporters'' react to things that take them out of their comfort zones.

 

I would bet good money that most newspapers have a definite point of diminishing returns after which increasing coverage of youth/kids sports actually reduces readership.

 

A lot depends on your market...Small markets ignoring youth sports is not smart. IMO.

 

Some good ideas here. Thanks. Knew I could count on the SJ Illuminati for sound advice.
We already do run a twice-weekly sports calendar/briefs package with upcoming events, which has always included things like youth sports and JV results when they're submitted. They're rarely submitted, though. I'll try putting out the call and see if we can change that, and then maybe break them out on their own if we start getting enough submissions.

TarHeel, I'm a 38-year-old married man who makes a living chronicling the exploits of teenagers, and possibly contributing to a future Columbine situation by putting these guys (who may or may not be assholes to their peers) on a pedestal. I'm not even against doing the occasional story on youth sports when it's warranted and newsworthy. God willing, I'll be doing this until I can retire. My typical week involves working close to 50 hours, writing a dozen or more stories (some of which I also shoot photos for) and paginating at least five and often six sections because our production staff was laid off two years ago. I do most of this alone because the bulk of our sports staff was also either laid off or not replaced when they left
It's not uncommon for me to go several days without having a conversation with my wife because she's working days and I'm working nights and we barely see each other. I bust my ass at work for a publisher who only seems to say hi to me to be nice, and who has no trouble dumping even more work on me because of a corporate philosophy that wants to eliminate any state and national coverage whatsoever from the paper (despite the fact that a hundred times more people are interested in State U.'s game than the local little league).
I've made my peace with most of that.
What tosses my soul and spirit into a trash compactor is the thought of tromping around little league fields in 90-degree summer heat to write a story on a 10-year-old nose picker who is going to say five words to me if I actually try to interview him, volunteer coaches who will largely do the same, and somehow have to spawn 500 words out of bullshit twice a week. And that's not even taking into account the creepiness of that last sentence. It's also not taking into account the idea of how I'm going to accomplish it without working 60 hours a week instead of 50.
That should throw any sane human being, not just journalists, out of their "comfort zone."

 

I have thought of taking a seriously passive-aggressive approach to all of this. The day after the Super Bowl is the one day a year I don't cringe when running nothing but wire copy. Does anybody give a flying crap about anything else that day?
This year, though, I've thought of finding some random kid and writing a glowing feature story on him. We can stick the Super Bowl in the agate briefs. After all, the logic I've heard is "they can get the national coverage anywhere."
Sure it might get me fired, but hey. It's local copy, right?

 

Unless you're management, charge them overtime. Even if you are management, point out that you get paid either for 40 or for 60, so you're choosing to work 40.

Find a second job so that you actually get paid for those 20 extra hours.

It's a business. Treat it as such.

 

My company has some issues, but not paying overtime isn't one of them. By early October of last year I'd already surpassed what I made the year before when there was little or no approved overtime.
Still haven't had a proper raise in about five years, but that helped.

And I'm also not quite alone. I do have a guy who helps with sports, but he's also doing news stories and often gets pulled in five different directions. He's still pretty green and I see his head spinning sometimes.
He's a great help and has taken some of the load off, but trying to figure out when I do and don't have him available still makes it feel like a 1 3/4-person department.