CALL FOR NOMINEES: Best HSAA prep operations

Agreed, except for wrestling. The rent-a-security guards in champaign are fascist.

And it'd be nice if they offered hot food at the boys basketball tournament for more than an hour. But other than that, no complaints.

 

On the final day of the Wyoming state basketball tournament, the WHSAA serves prime rib in the hospitality room. ;D

 

Ohio's HSAA is either horrible or fantastic. There's no middle ground with this organization.

One day you'll be covering a state semifinal football game in a cramped, ice-cold press box. Food? A bag of chips. Media coordinator doesn't know what planet she is on. Even though you've made it abundantly clear on a series of e-mails, faxes and phone calls that you will need a space to work and a phone line after the game, the cronies will shrug their shoulders. At this same event, you'll be kicked out of your press box seat perhaps as many as three times, so some salaried OHSAA good-ol' boy and his wife have a place to sit. Following the game, they'll lock you inside the stadium, turn the power off and present you with the challenge of leaping over a 10 foot wall to get out of the place.

That said, there have also been times I've driven halfway across the state to elaborate gyms where everything is first class (usually this occurs at university sites).

Oh yeah...The web site is perhaps the most cumbersome and ugly P.O.S. I've ever come across. The OHSAA has generally nothing to do with providing results for anything other than the state championship events. Quality big wrestling, track and cross country meet results are found at third-party web sites, which generally are not linked to on the OHSAA site.

From what I've seen of the PIAA next door, OHSAA has a ways to go. I simply love the fact that nearly all of PIAA's state championship events are broadcast on the government cable news channel. OHSAA farms out the basketball and football to the Ohio News Network, which most of the state can't get. ONN's broadcasts are fuckin' amateur hour at best.

 

The MHSAA in Michigan is fine at state finals. Comparable to attending a Division I college event. They do try to tightly control coach and athlete availability after games, but everybody does that, and if you're a reporter worth a hoot, you have cell phone numbers for coaches and some of the key players anyway.

Lower tournament levels, are left up to the hosting schools, which results in wild variation of media services -- from "adequate" at the top end, to "abysmally disastrous" at the bottom end. I remember a few years ago, I covered a track regional which began at 9 a.m. It got to be about 9 p.m. Under normal circumstances, everything would be long ago wrapped up and everybody would be home.

When the "meet manager" let slip the fact that "I don't know nothin' about scoring track meets," two other writers and I got busy with pencils and paper. (Yes, this was in the days after computers had been invented). I called my desk and barfed out a 15-inch lead with event winners and a few quotes, so they had something to go with. The SE said, "stay there and see if you can get the results straightened out, we'll run the agate on Monday." We got out of there at 1 a.m.

This was the same school which called us in hysterical excitement one night to report their 4x100 relay team had just run a 36.2, which "they thought was a state record."

It wasn't a state record -- it was a WORLD record, by about 2 seconds. We said, "are you SURE??" They said, "Oh yes, we're sure." We put it in the agate. : : (We felt it was wiser to hold off on the 'OMFG!!! City High sets world record!!!!!' headlines for a day or two.)

The next day, of course, we got a flurry of phone calls from other area coaches, including a couple who were at the meet (it was a quad or some such bullcrap). "They had the staggers measured all wrong," the other coaches told us. "The last leg of the relay was about 50 meters. We were all yelling, 'wait a minute, you got the finish line set up about 50 yards too close up the track,' but oh no, they knew what they were doing, nobody was telling them what to do, shut up and run, yadda yadda. So if they want to say they set a record, fine, but it's for the 352-meter relay. I mean, how hard is it to figure out? The starting line and finish line are supposed to be the same, but oh no, they marched 50 yards down track and set up their watches. 'The finish line is here because of the staggers,' they said. We just threw up our hands and said 'whatever.' "

They dug in their heels and argued about it, too. We went the rest of the season in our honor roll first listing, then not listing, then (after screeching phone calls from their parents, AD and principal to the publisher) listing it again, then (after screeching phone calls from opposing schools, all yelling, "don't give us that bullshit, they're fast, but they're not THAT fast"), taking it out again, then more screaming phone calls ("jealous coaches are trying to take our kids down," blah blah) putting it back, so on and so on.

Finally the other three coaches at the meet signed a notarized joint letter stating "the track distance for the alleged state-record 4 x 100 meter run was improperly measured and the time is thus invalid," and we finally were able to scrub it from the books.

Later on in the spring, they did indeed win the state title. With a time of about 42.5. We got a bunch of phone calls from parents screaming how they had "justified" the time. Eventually, we just said the hell with it. Somebody told me that for a few years, on the school record board in the gym, they listed the time with an asterisk as "unofficial." : :

 

The media seems to be the last thing on the PIAA's mind. I've covered state playoff events at some pretty crappy venues, especially in basketball and softball.
But I will say that they will listen to suggestions. Covering state swimming this year was a snap with results provided pretty quickly on paper or the Internet. It took some cultivation by some of us veterans to get this far.
About the only other thing I have to say is the new website is hard to navigate.

As for wrestling in Virginia, I've got some VHSL horror stories that will make your hair stand up. There was almost a riot by the media at the end of the Group AAA Championships back in '98.

 

Currently working in Idaho, they do a pretty good job considering the size of the state. My only qualm is there is a almost no information on individual records, only top performances in state tournaments/champions, etc.
I really found that Colorado did a great job, too. It's got all the past results, brackets, etc., plus state individual records.

 

Amen. They try their best to make it as tough to do your job as possible in just about every sport.

 

Missouri is hideous. They have a pretty good media relations dept., oddly enough, who will give you the figurative shoulder to cry on when you're bitching about how terrible the overall organization is. They're terrible because they give you enough of a glimpse of how good they could be, then shut the door. I like their website; it's easy to navigate and is pretty up-to-date. Once an event starts, they tend to be pretty easy to deal with. It's just getting in the door and getting information from them is a monumental pain in the ass.

 

And at worst, ONN's broadcasts are auditions for the latest class of local heroes, er, OSU athletes, who misprounce names of players, coaches and schools.

 

The problem in Texas is the sheer fucking size of the organization -- more than 1,300 schools. Expecting someone to keep up with stats and records for 2,600 basketball teams is a bit much.

And the membership is that low because the UIL doesn't allow private schools (two have successfully sued for membership, but the restrictions placed on them have scared off most others that would try). Also, the UIL oversees all interscholastic activities, holding competitions ranging from debate and academic contests to music and drama (my sister thought it was a big deal when her one-act play class went to the regional meet 30 or so years ago).

Because of all this, the UIL doesn't really have that many sanctioned sports -- 14 total (21 if if count things like boys and girls basketball separately), and soccer, softball and wrestling weren't even added until the 1990s. Sports like gymnastics, lacrosse, field hockey and ice hockey have their pockets of support around the state, but comparatively few schools participate.

In pretty much every sanctioned sport, schools are responsible for making their own arrangements at least up to the regional semifinals and usually through the state quarterfinals before the UIL takes over (there's a big battle raging in football over having predetermined sites for state championship games). Until the state tournaments in most sports, all the UIL worries about is verifying the results of each playoff contest in a timely manner (and that is also the responsibility of the schools involved).

The good news is that if you are covering a state event other than football, you're somewhere around Austin and the UIL does a pretty good job of getting out results on such things.

Now, for a truly horribly run organization, look no further than the New Mexico Activities Association. Here's how the NMAA runs off a state championship football game: Insist that all media MUST have a credential issued by the NMAA in hand before being allowed into the stadium, only to tell press that they cannot sit in the pressbox and they are not allowed on the sideline because they do not have the proper credential. I had this happen to me twice, and both times made my displeasure known in no uncertain terms within earshot of the entire NMAA administrative contingent. The threat of seeing their shortcomings listed in print and distributed across the state didn't exactly endear me to these people, but it got them to pull their heads out of their asses for a few hours, at least.