But they work so hard!!!!!

good enough on my end.

 

From what I know, there is no cartain rule (in Michigan) that says what grades play where.

Here's a few examples...

Player A is a senior, he is mildly retarded...he can play, but not compete...he plays on the freshman basketball team as a bench player.

Player B is a senior also, an exchange student from Africa. Has never played American football before, but wants to play. He is on the JV team.

I've seen this happen in both cases.

Basically, anyone can play JV or frosh. But I think it's more of a pride thing. If you have played ball for 4 years, do you really want the slap in the face of playing JV ball as a senior?

 

We covered four junior highs at the weekly in Warrenton, Va., where I worked for a couple of years ... it was painless for me because the games were typically played on Wednesday afternoons -- and our deadline was on Tuesday. So it was easy to do featurish stuff.

Besides, if you're in a community long enough, those good seventh- and eighth-graders will be the kids you're covering on the varsity before long. Which was exactly the case when i went back to string games a coupla years later.

 

If I find a really strong feature on a kid that's middle school or JV, something that will transcend the sport, then I have no problem doing a good feature. I will walk before I cover a JV game.

 

the worst is when you have to deal with band parents who are convinced that 8,000 people show up not to see a football game, but their kid march. The line from our staff, that we wanted to tell all those parents was always that whenever bands started charging one another on a field, we'll cover them.

 

I was close to doing just that, but I put myself in a state of meditation and walked away from the old bastard. The cops would have likely just said, "Yeah, why did you cover the wrestling match?" They were a bunch of Keystone Cops over there.

 

Here's why we don't cover JV, or sophomores, or freshmen, or middle school, or Little League, or YMCA, or other youth leagues.

We cover 26 high schools, three in the city. Of those 26 high schools, 23 are in Iowa. Since Iowa plays its high school baseball and softball in the summer, we have a grand total of seven weeks a year when we don't have high school sports going on, and of those seven weeks, we spend four or five of those working on preview stuff for the upcoming seasons.

We also have a Class A Midwest League minor league baseball team here that plays 70 home games. We have a dirt race track that averages 2,200 fans each Saturday night and 95 percent of the drivers are from the circulation area. We also have one of the best golf courses in the state that annually hosts two or three big tournaments (U.S. Open qualifiers, U.S. Amateur qualifiers, state amateur tournaments, etc.). We also cover two Division I universities that are within a 1:15 drive from here.

I have three other full-timers on my staff. Combined, next year we'll have 14 weeks of vacation coming, which means for more than 25 percent of the year I'll be one person short.

So, we don't have time for anything below the varsity level. If they want to call in their scores, fine. But don't expect us to be there.

Has it pissed some parents off? Sure. Do I care? No, because I have to make sure I allocate my resources to the things that most of our readers are interested in seeing in our paper.

I would imagine my problems are the same as a lot of posters on here.

And to echo what was said above: YOU'LL NEVER MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY.

 

Damn, Hawkeye ... that's textbook. That post is rip-n-read, laminate it and put it on your desk next to your phone. There may never be a way to shut these people up. But when you lay it out for them piece by piece, at least they understand you're not telling them no just to piss them off, or because you don't care that "the kids work hard."

 

I have written this (not in this form) in a column last spring, when it's really the worst with everything going on.

Oh, I forgot to add that we have a junior college that plays men's and women's basketball, baseball, volleyball and softball.