How do you go about selecting All-Area/All-Bi-City teams other than football?

Our esteemed competition, a start-up web site claiming to be the "largest newspaper in town" despite not having a print product and web traffic numbers that are about a tenth of what we get, put out its all-county football team last week on the same day as ours.
In a town with four high schools, their offensive team had eight linemen, three quarterbacks, five running backs and three receivers. Their coach of the year was a junior high coach. Several names were flat-out wrong. Out of about 35 players overall on the team, they had "No photo available" tags for about half of them. Just a lazy, awful product all around.
And yet people were still telling them what a great job they did on Facebook. It makes me want to scream into a pillow.

 

I figured it was at least that far back.

 

In my hometown area, "minor sports" are essentially played in secret. The "mid-size metro," where I worked for three years as a stringer in the 1980s, gets maybe a half dozen prep agate results per night during the sports seasons. Of course their page space has shrunk to nothing, so they'd have nowhere to put it if they got it.
They covered 52 schools BACK INNN MYYYY DAYYYYY, I think now because of consolidations and other factors they're probably down to about 40.
So among these 40 schools, the districts still each offering an average of about 10 varsity sports per gender per year.
Little-bitty small-county schools may only offer 3-4 sports per gender, but the big metro area schools offer up to 16. Anyway overall I'd guess the average is about 10. So multiply that by two genders, by 40 schools, then subtract 80 boys' basketball and football teams which get most of the media coverage, and you still have roughly 720 varsity teams in the area; 200+ per season.
They get reports on maybe a couple dozen events per week.
Many teams now run their own team pages on Facebook or MaxPreps or the school district's own web page, etc etc, but I'd put that figure at probably 25%. Many or most of the pages on MaxPreps are several years out of date.
So bottom line, 90+ percent of the "minor" prep sports never get covered at all, by anyone.
Hell, for that matter, on football and basketball Fridays, because of a 9 p.m. deadline, they rarely get more than a couple games in anyway. And you can imagine how enthusiastic coaches are about calling in day-old results on Saturday, so in Sunday's paper they usually get capsule reports from maybe a dozen games or so, scores only on another 20 or so, and then nuthin' out of about 20.
The state HS athletic association does require football and basketball teams to send in their scores for playoff point purposes, so that's the default source if you need to know a team's WL record. Beyond that, good luck.

All-Area teams?!? (Jacking-off gesture.)

 

As God is my witness, I just sent this email to a local coach about the all-area boys soccer team:

Coach, this is an All-Pixley County team, not an All-Hooterville team. There are a lot of fantastic players on your team, but there are also others on the other teams in the county. I'm sorry you feel this way, but there are other players in the county who excel at the classification they are at. That is our main criteria for selection. We want everyone in the county represented. If we stuck with just the best players in the county they'd all be from Hooterville and Pixley. That's not very inclusive to the whole county, and as an educator you should at least appreciate the concept of inclusion. I should also note that you are a finalist for Coach of the Year. Thanks, Twirley

 

At my final stop, we didn’t. The coaches would vote their all-conference and all-state picks (the coaches association didn’t allow them to vote for their own players) and we’d do stories off that, but we weren’t trying to come up with the All-Circulation Area teams ourselves.

It was awesome.

 

You need to decide if you want a true all-area team or if every school has to be represented. One year we did all-area basketball and put on the best player from the smallest school. Honestly, the guy was pretty good, but if we took 5 guys from the newsroom we would have beaten that team. One coach called and said, "I know why you chose that kid, but he couldn't even have made our team."

 

That illustrates the biggest problem we had with our all-area teams. Are you honoring the best players or the best seasons? Does the top player on a small-school state champion deserve a spot more than the State U commit at the big school who was bounced in the first round of his playoffs? Does the McDonald’s All-American from the area win the POY award without a vote?

I favored the best seasons. That was not always a popular decision.

 

Do your best, put together a good spread and most importantly, don’t ever engage coaches or parents who complain about them.

I’ve stopped spending much time on these. I use the all-conference teams and ask coaches if I need input. I have a good group of coaches now who understand all I have to do and are just happy we do them.

Im doing all-decade teams with everything off right now. Pretty easy, just have to use the archives. I’m blowing it out. Why not? I’ve got time and space.

 

As long as I've been at my shop, we've only done all-area teams for two sports per season: football and volleyball in the fall, boys and girls basketball in the winter, and baseball and softball in the spring. We've had some coaches inquire why we don't do more all-area teams for other sports such as wrestling, but frankly we just don't have the time or the knowledge to do a quality job with them. Those six sports do get a large chunk of the prep coverage during the season too, so again some of the other coaches get kinda butthurt from time to time. But we do try to appease them somewhat with an extra feature or two during the season, though it doesn't always happen.

 

May want to consider doing a POY in some of the minor sports. We did that with golf, tennis, swimming, cross country and track.

 

We've never had the depth among our teams to do an all-county team in most of those sports. It's hard to do an all-county team or a POY when you have one OK player, 10 scrubs, and two of four schools that don't give a crap about a particular sport.
We did, however, start doing a team and POY for track a few years ago at the random insistence of a former ME.
We've been blessed with some great teams and athletes since we started doing it, which has made it easy. We usually have at least a dozen that qualify for the state meet and make an all-county team viable, and a couple that win state championships to justify a POY award. My general rule of thumb is, if you make it that far then you've earned a spot even if you finish DFL. So picking the team is pretty simple. Just pick whoever makes it to the state meet, and pick the POY from the top finishers. It tends to sort itself out.

Track is weird, though, in that nothing before the postseason really matters. Some top athletes don't even compete until the last regular-season meet or two. Our state's season got scrubbed on March 15, well before they reached that point. So even though we're going ahead with softball and baseball all-county teams based off the one-half or one-third season they did get in, there's just no good way to pick a valid all-county track team this year.

 

I know I mentioned it uptopic, so I'll d_b myself: If you made state in wrestling, you made the team. Would usually a few people who fell just short at Masters to fill it out. We had some sports that not all schools participated in or were so bad (girls golf scores in the 90s for nine holes), a POY was the only way to go.