Club youth sports teams: Why should anybody other than parents GAF?

I did consider Little League beneath me and the readers.

 

Your hatred of newspapers simply will not stand.

 

Pffft, little league sports are beneath me. I only write things people care about.

Anyways, I'm off to cover HS prep golf. It's either that or run a wire gamer from the MLB team 50 miles away. They'll be two hours into their next game by the time most people read the paper.

 

I agree with this, and maintain it's just as lazy to mindlessly say, "Well, it's local, so let's cover a LL game and stick it on the cover" as it is to go with a wire cover.

Local is not the same thing as local interest. And local interest should be paramount, and it is the SE's job to figure out how to make his section a must-read. I'm sure there are some areas where youth baseball falls in that local interest circle. But I think it's pretty rare.

It's not an either-or thing, you know. It's not run either HS prep golf or a wire gamer from the MLB team 50 miles away, and option C is to leave the page blank.

 

What's Option C? A feature on a local 17-year-old athlete who has a mildly interesting backstory?

 

If you take away mildly interesting features, what else would qualify as award-winning material?

 

Just submit a million photos. One will win something.

 

Seventeen-year-old athletes are not inherently interesting.
Being good at a high school sport is not inherently interesting.

 

I don't know your area. But again, if your only options are a LL gamer, a stale wire MLB gamer, or a mildly interesting story on a 17-year-old athlete, then either the area is horribly devoid of news, or the SE isn't doing his job correctly.

 

We're talking about small towns here. Of course it's horribly devoid of news.

 

In the summer there aren't many good options. You've got youth/community sports, wire stories or off-season features. You could try to do something ambitious, but that depends on having the manpower to pull it off, and even then, you'd still have a lot of weaknesses in the summer schedule before football practice begins. Even the big papers feature a lot of crap in the summer that wouldn't see one pica of newsprint in the other three seasons.

 

Yeah, I don't miss the summer from my last job as ASE...having to come up with content daily that ranged from updates on a historical basketball organization that wanted to start a HoF in town (that was good for a once-a-month update), or a series about male high school coaches coaching females and vice-versa, or hitting up the local amateur MMA group to see what tin-can is going to get beat up this weekend.
Add in the Legion team gamers, features off the Legion team (a catcher learning a new staff quickly; he art of base-stealing from the team speedster; a profile of the Legion coach; and the in-depth report: "Sunflower Seeds vs. Bubble Gum"); and the local swim club, youth bowling league and Special Olympics....hell we centerpieced a shuffleboard feature once!!!

Yup, devoid of news indeed!