Any sport you don't enjoy covering???

Field hockey. On grass.

Awful.

 

Actually, cross country is pretty easy. The race is over in about a half hour, and you just stand by the finish line and talk to runners as they cross. And since there's no play-by-play, you wind up writing more about the people than the event. Of course, you have to remember the scoring - similar to golf, the lower score wins - but once you do, cross country is a pleasure.

 

Good call. I've seen bad teams play on grass and good teams play on grass, and ultimately they're ALL bad teams on grass. But it's hard to pony up money and/or land for artificial turf that would get used for one sport (you can count the artificial football fields in this state with two hands).

 

Good call there. It's been nearly a year since I covered track, thus the glaring omission. Flat out forgot.

 

Any sport such as high school soccer, baseball and bad girls' basketball (90 percent of high school girls' basketball) when I'm bored out of my mind, look into the stands and see 30 fans for each side -- made up exclusively of parents, little brothers/sisters, boyfriends/girlfriends -- and I realize: "Everyone who will read this story is at the game."

 

Sounds riveting. Fortunately for me, I won't likely ever have the pleasure of hitting up a cross-country meet. Thanks for telling me what it's like, though.

 

Swimming and Wrestling, cause the parents of the athletes are fucking crazy

 

Ditto. Also on my extreme dislike list: Cross county, soccer, volleyball. And rounding out my top five? Golf. Hate it. Hate playing it, hate watching it on tv, hate covering it. Sucks when I have no choice though.

I enjoy covering swimming and gymnastics, so, of course, I am the only preps person at my paper that does either (I can't wait to see what happens in two weeks when the district and state meets are on the same weekends for those two sports). I grew up on softball and baseball, and I've lived in "track town usa." Track and field is cake to cover, as long as you don't have to type in the agate.

 

Testify.

 

Stacking.

 

I would agree with the person who wrote track. One time, I covered a high school indoor invitational, and having never covered the sport, I showed up at the start which was around 3 or 4 p.m.
It started getting around 7 when I thought, "Well hopefully they'll be done in another hour." Then came 8. Then came 9, and then came 10 o' freakin' clock. It was six or seven hours long.
On top of that, there was also nowhere to sit in this fieldhouse. The one set of bleachers quickly filled with parents, and I had to stand or walk around the entire time.

Having been a high school wrestler, I like covering wrestling. I understand why reporters who have little experience would think it was boring because it can be. I was telling the girlfriend the other day how at one tournament where I was eliminated early, I threw rocks into a lake for two or three hours to pass the time.
I covered a conference wrestling champoinship this weekend that took three hours for 14 sets of matches.

Early season softball is wonderful in comparison to early season baseball. I couldn't imagine sitting through that all the time. I did it a couple times, but I had the fortune of covering softball for seven years. Those 1-0 games in an hour were a breeze to the 15-7 baseball ones where neither pitcher could find the plate.
There was one game where it was about 30 degrees with the wind blowing in at probably 25-30 mph. I put my chair (which I highly recommend for anyone covering baseball or softball ... get one of those soccer mom chairs) behind the windscreen on the backstop. That made it two degrees warmer. The game ended in a scoreless tie after 13 innings and never resumed.

As far as covering events below high school level, I had a mix of experiences but most of them good. I wouldn't advocate covering below varsity because I think there's a time and place for coverage. However, I did a couple of junior high basketball championships, and they were decent experiences. In one of them, I saw two future Division I girls players face off, including a pretty notable one that's currently in school and should be a No. 1 pick in the WNBA. The game before that (the "junior varsity" teams) was a 14-11 double overtime thriller where one person got kicked out for cursing at the ref, one girl (a future DI volleyball player) shot at the wrong basket and started crying. Everytime someone made a mistake there was crying and carrying on and tears.
The kids were genuinely excited to talk to me, whereas, some of the high school athletes in my area could care less sometimes if they were interviewed or if you just went away.

 

Exactly.

Swimming gets the nod for the worst, though, because to go along with the crazy parents, you almost always know who's going to win ahead of time.