But they work so hard!!!!!

i've heard this shit three times in the last week.

Local golf team here is undefeated (5-0 entering the week) and we've been flooded with emails on our supposed lack of coverage. We have ran submitted results, when we get them (which isnt often)

Meanwhile, the past 4 weeks we've been short staffed, trying to put together TWO football sections. As well as staffing prep football scrimmages and jamborees and the season began two weeks ago (Meaning 2 mid-week notebooks, 2 game advances and 2 gamers) for our paper. Add in the other prep sports and its been a difficult, busy month.

The parents all but demanded us to show up and cover them the next three golf matches. They also said (emails looked strangely similar) the customary, "these kids work just as hard as the basketball and football teams." And continued that the football team at the school doesnt have much success, but continue to get front-page top stories.

My reply to the folks was:
1) Explained to them our staff situation and workload
2) The state assoc. began golf season earlier this year, which didnt help.
3) We'd appreciate it if the coach or someone would call in results
4) That our coverage is generated on interest. An 0-10 football team would still likely draw a good 1500-2500 people here per home game. Also, that people are much more interested in coverage to see what the coach is thinking and saying when the team is struggling, more than winning.
5) That we'd be glad to cover the golf team whenever we have time or if they are still undefeated as they wind down their season, not after they've played a handful of non-conference matches.

 

You're making me flash back to my days covering preps..

Call #1 - You don't cover Eastside enough.
Call #2 - You don't cover Westside enough.
Call #3 - You're covering Eastside too much.
Call #4 - You're covering Westside too much.

You're better off not answering the phone at all.

 

Yeah, one of my dear friends is always asked "How come you hate East Bumfuck?" Except for when he's being asked "How come you hate "West Bumfuck?" Or "How come the only teams you write about are East Bumfuck and West Bumfuck?"

 

I can't help but think of the line from Christmas Vacation when Clark's lights don't go on.

"He worked really hard Grandpa."
"So do washing machines."

 

In high school, I joined the band to get into the football games for free. Ended up marching a couple summers of drum+bugle corps competitions, saw most of the major stadiums in the Northeast, but never once considered the idea that what we were doing belonged in the sports section.

Face it -- no matter what you cover and how you cover it, you will never, ever, EVER be able to please 100% of your readers. Case in point: a couple of Marches ago, when it seemed like every local high school team in our two-state area was in a faraway playoff game on the same Saturday night the local D-1 team was on the road, the sub-20K daily I subscribe to ran 13 bylined stories the next morning. I read it and thought, "man, those guys worked their asses off yesterday." And then, the e-mails from the hometown girls' basketball families rolled in, decrying the idea that the boys' team got more space. (Mind you, the girls' team had a photo on friggin' A-1 that week, along with fairly equal coverage in the section. And I'm female, so I think I would have noticed any gender bias.)

The SE responded, and I'm glad he did.

 

That's pretty well-said. Every paper I've worked at goes by that same system: If a team makes the playoffs, the game will be covered -- either by a staffer or a stringer. Period. We've never worried about the equality of coverage between boys and girls because with that rule, it's never been an issue.

 

You tell 'em, Chuck!

 

A big BRAVO! to that SE for telling it like it is. I thank him.

 

Of course, you could use this excerpt from a magazine article on (professional) cheerleaders:

"Women may have come pretty far in the past 50 years, but not far enough. No matter where these women work, or how intelligent and interesting they are, no matter what being a cheerleader means to them, to most people, they’re still just going to be one step up from strippers."

Wee!

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/thigh_eagles_thigh/page9

 

Cheerleading is not a sport, despite the attempts by the Tammy Faye mamas to cook up a stupid and contrived "competitive cheer" category, mainly to divert high school athletic department dollars away from other actual legitimate sports in which girls might wish to participate -- sports in which they will be judged on their actual ability in the sport in question, not on the bounciness of their butts and boobs, and the success of the boys' football and basketball teams for which they are "cheering."

 

Hey, Rick Reilly said it's not a sport, so that's good enough for me.
Although I laughed when he talked about the hate mail he got as a result:
They said "I hope you die" but dotted the I with a heart.

 

Though I don't work in sports anymore, I was always tempted to answer the question of "why don't you cover cheerleading and band like you cover football?" with "because you don't want us to. You don't want us to run stories pointing out that the clarinets were woefully late on the bridge on their second song and that the tuba player's footwork was all wrong. You don't want us to point out that out of four basket tosses, the third set of girls dropped little Susie Flyer three times."

If we based coverage decisions on actual reader interest (what a novel concept), football would get 95 percent of the coverage, and cross-country, golf, etc., would be relegated to agate. Call me the next time anyone other than a parent shows up to a golf match. Members of the community who have no vested interest in a sports team show up to football games and basketball games, in the overwhelming majority of places, anyway. And they don't tend to show up to girls basketball games unless that team happens to be particularly outstanding. And that's it, with the possible exception of baseball, and I'd venture that's a stretch.

Honestly, if we based our coverage decisions on what the majority of readers actually want, we'd give a lot more space to pros and colleges and a lot less to preps.

And of course, you haven't lived until someone tells you that Title IX mandates that you give equal coverage to girls and boys sports.

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