State HS Associations demanding more coverage of girl's sports

Tell them you're going to cut back on football to cover volleyball. And then ask if that's what they want.

 

If they want volleyball coverage, there's a very good chance that's EXACTLY what they want. Often times they want you to sacrifice football coverage for _____ coverage, because they think you commit too many resources too football.

 

Had that on my beat the last couple of years. The school I cover was placed in a district that decided to play district volleyball matches on Friday, starting with subvarsty at 5 p.m. Football games start at 7:30p.m. Once district football started, the volleyball and football schedules coincided with the same schools playing each other in both.

I had to explain to more than one volleyball mom that until they could guarantee me that the varsity match would be finished by about 6 p.m., giving me time to knock out a quick story and still make kickoff at a stadium eight miles from the gym, I was going straight to football. Of course, with JV playing first the varsity often didn't even start until about 6:30.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that the football team regularly sells out a 15,000-seat stadium while the volleyball team might draw 200 or so. The biggest volleyball crowds were usually on Tuesday nights, when the football players were in attendance.

And for what it's worth, I've covered sports in several states and the NMAA is by far the worst-run organization I've dealt with.

 

Some states are talking varsity girls' flag football. Florida for one, I think

 

Dan: It's the lifeblood for a lot of folks. You know that.

 

I actually had a mom tell me that if the soccer team played on Friday nights, their crowds and interest would be BIGGER than football, since soccer is a "better" sport.

Her argument was that we not only should cut back on football coverage, but we should cover soccer exactly like we cover football -- e.g., staff every game, home and away, weekly previews/stat package -- because the only reason it "wasn't as popular" was because a) they didn't play on Friday nights, and b) we didn't cover soccer as much.

 

They actually can demand it.
The second definition of the word says as much.
They cannot require it.

 

I find it heartening that in an age where people talk about the death of newspapers, someone still sees a newspaper as something of influence.

 

I think the scrapbook lobby is behind all of this.

 

I'm an SE in N.M., and have heard no such thing from any of the ADs in my coverage area. Like many of the others have said, it is your job to cover what people want to read about. It's not about being fair. It's about understanding what your readership wants.

 

Right or wrong, it seems like nobody really turns to the sports section in our papers for news, to learn something they didn't know. The readers seem to want either scrapbook material or free advertising.
And as much as management is pushing our online product, our readers still see us mostly as a newspaper.

 

I once had an athletic director call and complain we hadn't been covering the (highly-successful) girls lacrosse team enough and that parents were mad that the boys lax team and baseball were getting all of our coverage. I told her I would get back to her.

I went back and tallied every team we had covered that season and how many stories each received. Turned out, I had given that girls lacrosse squad three more stories more than any other team, including a pair of successful baseball teams.

I called her back, told her I had tallied how much coverage they had received and realized that, in fact, they'd received more coverage than any other squad and several other teams were underrepresented in our paper. To balance things out, I wasn't going to see them again until the playoffs.

That didn't go over well.