Covering winless teams

We broke that rule this year for the first time, and I instantly regretted it.

Podunkville HS started a girls soccer program this year and they played Year 1 at the JV level before moving up to varsity next year. My thought was since they're only at JV for a year and will be a varsity team next year, might as well get in the groove of covering them a few times. Well, a few times turned into sending a reporter for basically every home match. It was good practice for our new part-timer, but I did get questions asking why JV girls soccer was getting so much pub.

 

Never go down the JV wormhole. Even if you're hyperlocal.

That said, one of the more-enjoyable experiences at my last stop was covering the women's basketball team at Podunk JC. They didn't hire a coach until June, so missed most of the first-tier local prospects, and that first season was rough, but good God did they hustle to make games close.

 

Around here, the JV is actually different -- and lower than -- the eighth and ninth grade teams. The latter have their own league and a conference tournament at the end, while the former just plays games. So I don't have a major issue with doing a one-off story on the junior high teams if they win a championship, or reporting scores if they're called in. We do a quick junior high/JV roundup in our calendar twice a week.
Game-to-game, regular coverage of that stuff is a bridge too far, though. Especially when the powers that be are already jumping down my neck about overtime.
I had a softball parent ask me once why we don't cover the JV team. I looked straight at her and said, "Do you have a family? Yes? Well so do I."
That seemed to make sense to her.

 

Depends on who the 8th-grade stud is. Mississippi schools, both public and private, are allowed to play 7th and 8th graders on the high school varsity if they're good enough, and during my time covering preps, I had several who did indeed start playing varsity in 7th grade and ended up playing 6 years of high school ball. One of them is now a starter for an MLB team and he was the best player on his high school team when he was in 7th grade.

 

A dozen or so years ago, one of our private schools got a new baseball coach who looked at his first roster and cleaned house. Ran off a few malcontents, benched some underperforming seniors, the whole nine yards. By the end of the season I think six of his nine starters were in Grades 7-9.
The starting catcher got kicked out of school after being arrested for drug possession. The coach said of the backup, an eighth-grader at the time, "He was going to be a four-year starter. Now he's going to be a five-year starter."
Most of the younger kids had grown up playing tournament ball together, and there was a core group of parents who actually understood coaching. They let the coach be a hardass when he needed to be, and kept most of the others off his back.
The team took some lumps the first year or two, but it was obvious they had talent and were improving. As juniors and seniors, they won back-to-back state championships. It was fascinating to watch their evolution over those five years. By the time they were seniors they were basically running their own practices. They'd show up at 3, and by the time the coach got there at 3:15 they were already stretching and throwing.

 

When the middle school here went back to interscholastic athletics (after having intramurals exclusively for about 20 years), we had a publisher who insisted on covering those teams exactly the same as the high school varsity (although there were enough conflicts in schedules that that was not always possible). He even got the junior high coaches in Neighboringtown to start sending in their stuff.

He's gone, I've dialed back the local middle school coverage significantly (if it gets in at all, it's a roundup-type thing) and stopped accepting the other school's stuff. I can't eliminate the local school completely because the publisher who replaced him will get a call, then email me "Why we aren't doing this?"

Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with people who think freshmen and JV games matter. And that goes back decades, long before I got here. I've managed to get that down to, "If it's sent to me, I'll see if I can get it in. No guarantees. If nobody sends me anything, I'm not going to look for it."

 

Who was it?

 

Actually, I'm not if he's still a starter, but it was Jacoby Jones, with Detroit.

 

Nice. I was going to guess Will Clark, Rafael Palmeiro or Bobby Thigpen. But I don't know which or if any of them were actually from Mississippi. Knew they all played for Miss. State.

 

None of them are.

 

I once covered a school that for reasons I never understood valued the integrity of the JV season. That meant when the rosters were set, they didn't change all that fluidly, as having a good JV team apparently meant something to someone.

It was a big football school that wanted a docile basketball program. The coach was better suited for another spot, and he treated as "basketball season starts at tryouts and ends when you lose in the playoffs."

As you can imagine the coach wasn't popular, and one year, he set the rosters before a deep football playoff run ended. He didn't know that two of his better players, a 6-foot-4 wing who went on to play FCS WR and a 6-foot-5, 300-pound center, weren't going to play (Each had OK excuses to cover that they didn't like him). So this team at a 1,400-kid school would play with like 7-8 guys each game. Not just 7-8 to play, but 7-8 listed in the book.

It was a weird and unpleasant team. The best players were a future SEC lineman, whose first love was basketball and had to be convinced to play a sport that would give him a scholarship, and a future mid-major flameout whose AAU coach dad insisted the coach was lavishing attention on two young white players at the expense of black teammates (based on one interaction, could've been slightly accurate). Outside those two white kids that were in over their heads, the back end was older football players who were more strong than skilled.

Every so often they'd call in boxscores and I'd wonder why the football starting QB, who I'm sure was just kinda OK, was a senior point guard on a JV team. It all came to a head when the team was in the middle of a conference game and a few kids fouled out. The coach looked down the bench and realized one of his forwards had just left. Just got up mid-game and didn't return. So a school that size had to finish out with four guys on the court. It was kind of amazing.