Dear dimwit on the phone

Depends. Is it on TV?

This needs to be a A1 deal, not sports.

 

It's more than annoying, it needs to be stopped fucking pronto.

If your wife (or husband, partner, child, whatever) was arrested on drug charges, would it be OK for you to write up something on it and stick it in the news Qs?

Or if you just want to keep it with the sports discussion, when the little angel's baseball team goes to a tournament and shits the bed, does Mommy write something up on that and expect it to get in the paper?

 

Time for one of those come-to-Jesus meetings with the boss. Assuming she's not the boss.

 

This. Never ceases to amaze me how people who work at a newspaper, from newsroom folks to inserters, think that means special treatment from the sports guys.

My most recent stop, one of the ad reps was heavily involved in the local youth softball league. But she knew what we needed and was pretty adept with a phone cam for those post-tourney team photos. Same shop, when I started, publisher's daughter played varsity basketball as a sophomore, but we always managed to talk business in the office and sports at the gym. She eventually went on to play D1 at Montana.

 

Dear dimwit girls basketball coaches at game I covered tonight: Would it be that effing difficult to put the first AND last names of your players in the scorebook? It's the season now, not summer league.

 

It is extremely weak sauce. I've seen a bunch of non-area schools just put numbers in the book. I mean it should take like two minutes for a decent-size roster

 

We've had all of the above happen here, also including last names only...which would be fine because I'm pretty good about remembering names, except when there's 3-4 kids on the team with the same last name. Thankfully the numbers are also there so we can at least look up their names.

 

If there's only last names in the scorebook and no rosters at the school, I can usually find a team's full roster in a few minutes on the internet. Nearly every conference has a website, and most schools are getting full-fledged athletic websites now, too.

 

In Minnesota, the high school league makes all rosters available....as long as the teams entered them in. Not usually a problem with the major sports, but often becomes an issue in the spring.

 

Basketball rosters are the worst. We typically have three different ones over the course of the season:
1) The roster when the season starts in November
2) The roster a few weeks later when football finishes up (an especially big problem at small schools)
3) The roster after New Year's, when semester grades are in and players mysteriously join or leave the team because they're now eligible/ineligible

 

I know full names for both teams were on Maxpreps, since I had looked there that afternoon, and since I was only covering the girls game (it was a doubleheader: Girls at 5:30, boys at 7), I had time when I got back home to open a tab to the rosters. But who has that luxury every time? The photographer assigned to the game - who I learned from the morning dead tree edition had spent much of the day shooting storm-damaged areas - was also unhappy.

 

I'm reminded of, when I covered juco basketball, a school that canceled the women's team just before conference play. I asked a friend what happened, and he said "A third of them sick, a third of them flunked out, a third of them pregnant."