Arriving to an empty building

On more than one occasion I showed up to cover a high school baseball game only to find no one at the stadium. Rain was either coming or had been and soaked the field, so they played at the other team's place and didn't bother to tell the media.

And other times, the threat of rain caused them to cancel the JV game and play the varsity at 5 instead of 7. I generally tried to get to the game at least 30 minutes ahead of time, but did so more than once with the game already in the 5th inning.

 

Back in the mid 90s our district basketball tourney finals were ppd due to foul weather on a Friday night. Saturday arrives, sun beaming from a cloud-less sky, all roads clear, I drive 30 minutes to the site arriving about a hour before tip-off and notice just 2 or 3 cars in the front lot which holds only about 18 vehicles. I wait about 30 minutes and come to the realization that there's no game. No one bothered to inform us and come to find out the game was ppd from Saturday night cause the tourney director had a family event that evening.
Just a couple years ago, I go 35 miles to cover a softball-baseball doubleheader. First game at 5 so I arrive at 4:15 with about six cars in the lot on a sun-splashed day. I phone the AD from the visiting school (that's the one I cover) and he tells me the softball game was moved to 7 which is also the baseball start time. So then I was in the middle of Nowheresville with about 21/2 hours to burn.

 

Unless the event and its sponsoring organization is really really important to your readership (maybe also to your ad department), when this happens, you need to teach them a lesson.

Run the bare-minimum coverage necessary for your readership interest (i.e. a phone gamer). Run a wire story to fill whatever space you had planned for it. DO NOT invest additional time or assign people to do 'catch-up' coverage the next day.

Make sure the sponsoring organization knows it's getting short-strawed on coverage. Be sure to tell them, a couple times at least, "You know, if you guys had given me accurate time and date info on this thing in the first place, you would have probably gotten great coverage. But I have other things to do than go out and park in empty parking lots and knock on locked doors."

Don't let it slide, or it will happen again and again.

Of course, if they ARE really really important, in the end you have to grin and bear it.

 

My boss said drop it and I informed the coordinator. But I said I could turn the interviews I did leave with into a feature. I would just need to stop by one of his youth boxing classes.

I prefer to give a source a second chance. After that they fall on my.blacklist.

 

Couple of years ago, two of our local high schools were supposed to play in a holiday basketball tournament at the same foreign gym. The way the schedule set up, it was nice. Cover three games, put in a full day and get a day out of the office.
Well, I showed up about 30 minutes before the first game and none of the locals' buses are in the parking lot (always a bad sign), and there weren't many cars in the parking lot either, so I knew right away that something was amiss.
I go inside and the host team is practicing. I waited for a break and asked the coach what the deal was. Turns out, the school's scoreboard had blown a fuse and they hadn't been able to get it fixed, so they'd canceled the tournament -- two weeks prior.
No one from either of our local teams, which we covered several times in that span and had regular contact with, had ever thought to tell me, "Oh yeah, that tournament is canceled." Not even in passing, like saying they were going to have the holidays off or how a two-week break was going to hurt them.
Luckily, another of our schools was playing in a different tournament right up the road about an hour later, so I was able to salvage the day without too much fuss. I still let the other coaches know I wasn't too pleased, though. We'd covered that tournament in the past, so even though it was out of town you'd have thought someone would have mentioned SOMEthing in the weeks leading up to it.

 

I became a weather nazi last season. Seems like there was some threat of rain or showers for damn near every game, or it had rained the day before, so it felt like I was texting our coaches every game day afternoon to make sure they were still playing or the game hadn't been moved up. Days it had been rained out or changed were like winning the lottery.

 

Easy answer solo. I should have looked harder and not assumed. But the two teams are on the fringe of the coverage area. Like I said, I already had a feature ready to go to in place of the gamer from that game. We (my editor and myself) didn't really care whether that game got covered or not, because the vast majority of our readership didn't care if that game got covered.

 

Had one spot where no one in the office mentioned the school I was going to had an off-campus fieldhouse with no parking, but made it for first tip.

Also had a bad beat with an out of town basketball playoff game. Found the school on the GPS (checked google and MacPreps for the address), drove up but was running late (i.e. getting there about 10 minutes before tip). Got to the school and no one's there. Lights off, no cars, the works. Drive around for a few minutes looking for any sign of life, but no. I drive to the nearest gas station and get directed to the brand new high school about 3 miles out of town. Was not happy to walk in halfway through the first quarter and then things got weird and racial, so that was fun.

 

Whenever I had to cover something at an out-of-area school (especially baseball, which seemed more prone to off-campus sites) I always called that school and double-checked the location of the venue.

If the game is important enough to send a reporter, and you're trying to get there for the beginning, then it's worth a phone call ahead of time to make sure you know where you're going. And that applies to both stringers and staffers.

 

Arrived to a ski-jump hill one night but jumping had been canceled but was able to turn it into something as part of a larger story about covering 6 events in a night. Try to make hay with what you've got at that moment, perhaps there's a story to be found and told; maybe not.

 

As an 18-year old part-timer, was assigned to cover a playoff game between Podunk and Smallville, teams on opposite outer fringes of our coverage area. I drove 2 hours to Podunk. The game was in Smallville. Thankfully another paper near Smallville was covering the game and was willing to call in a few quotes, and even more willing to (justifiably) make fun of me about it for years after.

 

I thought my sportswriting career was over just as it was starting. It was my first year stringing high school football games and only the second or third week of the season, so I was still pretty clueless. Prep editor calls me with my game. Local team at non-local team about a half-hour away, Friday night, 7 p.m.
I get there about 6:15, not only is there nothing going on, the stadium didn't even have lights.
I drove back to the office thinking I'm fired. Prep editor just shrugs and gives me a few phone numbers to try to track down info. Local team got smashed. Short story.
I didn't get fired.