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

Everyone is missing the point. You do it for the kids. That's why high school sports reporters exist. I simply do not understand why so many papers have this Twitter/social media mindset in their high school sports coverage when there's maybe 10 people who actually follow it and get their news that way. Waste of time. High school sports coverage exists so the 17-year-old football/baseball/basketball/soccer player who may be the best on the team but will still wind up at a Division II college and never play the sport after that can have his or her day in the sun, see themselves on the front page, and put the clip on the refrigerator.

 

Fuck the kids.

Well, don't literally fuck them.

 

Yeah, otherwise it's a Poin thread all of a sudden.

 

I avoided covering anything below varsity-level American Legion Baseball with ease for years in a town with a sub-20K circulation newspaper. For one, we took back our desk duties from the main copy desk for the summer. So that helped. Mostly, I spent time on news and features. I always made sure I had a good multi-story enterprise topic each summer. I wrote about athletic budgets, concussions, dietary supplements, and school construction, to name a few topics. That way, when the boss asked what I was working on (hoping I'd say "nothing" so he could stick me at some meaningless game to fill hours), I always had something better than a meaningless game. If the other reporter didn't have anything, then he got stuck covering those things. Sucked for him, but he wasn't my responsibility. I spent my early hours working on my projects and my night hours building pages or taking Legion baseball scores.

Even then, there were other things to cover for daily happenings: adult golf tournaments, adult rodeo, the annual decathlon, and the annual regatta.

Besides, of the four bodies in sports, two guys had two weeks of vacation to get it, while my boss and I eventually earned three weeks. We were always working a guy short during the summer.

 

Not even volleyball?

 

Either you forgot to use the blue font or you forgot we write for our readers, not our sources.

 

You write for the advertisers. Most of the time, they want the same thing readers want. Sometimes, though, advertisers want content the vast majority of readers could do without.

 

I wrote for myself, like Ivan Drago fought for himself.

 

He doesn't get a scholarship, he doesn't get a scholarship

 

We found out what RickStain wouldn't.

 

All-Stars in the area I used to cover was an event followed and attended by many in the community. The crowds were as large as any high school sport, save football, so I made sure it got top billing. It's about knowing your area. Who am I to tell the community it's not worthy of coverage if the community has decided its a big deal? Now, I did have trouble explaining the difference between the Dixie Youth Tournaments and travel ball to travel ball parents in terms they could understand. That was a headache.

 

High schoolers can read too