Dear dimwit on the phone

We had one of those early-morning signings last year just to have the big athlete on campus announce that he was going to a junior college. I'm glad I didn't get up for that one.

 

This. The more people you pester, the less likely I am to make the effort to get something covered.

 

They finally put the 10-second call in for women's college basketball. The people here must have known the rule because I never heard anyone yell. There was even a coach here for a while who would run out the clock with a lead by holding the ball in the backcourt for 25 seconds. No one from the other team ever came up to defend.

A few years ago, there was a men's coach at the juco who had two brothers come to every game. They'd shit on the officials all game long. One time, I was stunned to hear them actually say, "Good call." Then it turned out that even though the call favored their brother's team, when the official said it was a different foul than they thought it was, they still went ballistic ("How do you hold with YOUR HIP?")

 

I saw the signing day round up at my old shop. A kid going D-II was the lede, a kid going to a small D-I was buried five notes down. Another going to a D-III school got equal coverage as the D-I signee. At that point, I wanted to be the Dimwit On The Phone by calling the office and yelling at them for butchering the coverage.

 

Was the D2 kid more local than the one going D1?

 

Or had they done something else recently about the D-I kid?
Last week we had a small school whose only recruit leading up to signing day was a D-I player, so we wrote a big feature a few days beforehand. At the last minute, they had another guy go D-III and a third sign with a juco. So we glossed over the D-I guy in the signing day story (although we did lead off with him) and let the meat of it be the guys we hadn't written about yet.

 

Sadly, we have a news editor who doesn't know how to say no to some of these nuts. Someone called her to ask if a "Skating with Santa" event could run in the sports calendar. After all, it was ice skating.
She said yes. I said no. It didn't run in my section.

 

Do you get complaints about your lack of coverage of the "local team" even if said team is on the other side of the state? We used to have some guy call in all the time to rip us for not having regular coverage a college football team in the next state.

Our sports editor is like that. We suggest something, the answer is "No." A random caller suggests it, it's "Why aren't you doing this already?"

 

Same town, different school.

And Batman, no they had not done anything on the D-I kid previously.

 

I've never covered a kid signing D-I. There have been a couple who ended up D-I but they went to a juco first. There are occasional D-II's but the majority go to jucos. If they're good, they go the the local one. If they're better, they go to one with the multi-million dollar facility and giant-sized weight rooms. You know, the ones that can actually afford to have assistant volleyball coaches.

So every year, pretty much, it's just a photo and a cutline. Not going to go much farther for a kid who's going to fail to make it through pre-season football camp or quit the basketball team at semester (and that's the story of way too many of them).

 

Dear dimwit high school coach...

Please don't let your special-needs student manager call in scores. He doesn't speak clear, has a lisp and warbles with "Rs". He also must use a Fisher Price phone to call from because it sounds like he is talking through a pillow.

 

This manager could be the subject of a nice feature...