Dear dimwit on the phone

Doesn't mean he didn't try just as hard!

 

And you just cost him a DI scholarship. Hope you can sleep at night.

 

In my experience, this is usually a case of a kid wearing the wrong jersey number or an inaccurate roster.

 

Holy crap, do we know this story at my place. We get this every year with probably half of the 20-plus football teams in our coverage area. I've learned to expect the emails that start appearing the day after games, especially early in the season. And categorically every time we went with what was on the roster and it was wrong.

We've had this problem three years in a row with one coach in particular, and when I explained that to a mother who emailed me last week, she wrote back and told me she was going to speak to the coach about it, "because he needs to understand that his lack of diligence has consequences." I loved that line. Even though her next line was something about it costing kids stats and scholarships.

So now, not only do sports writers cost kids scholarships, lazy coaches do as well. So we've got company.

 

There's a part of me that wants to become a recruiter at a D-I college just so that I can tell parents I would have considered their kid for a scholarship if the local paper had had more coverage of him/her.

Especially swim parents.

 

Maybe parents should bank of Little Johnny's grades to provide some scholarship money, instead of relying on his fastball.

 

Who throws fastballs in football? Now I'm confused...

 

Yeah, he definitely struck out on fourth down with that analogy.

 

I thought it was pretty funny two weeks ago when the local stadium announcer announced who made the tackle on the kickoff return, and the visiting crowd (sitting right below him) yelled something. He responded, on the PA, "Well, you guys have two 57s anyway, which is stupid."

 

In truth, though, lazy coaches do cost kids scholarships. I have covered a few high schools that are well-oiled machines when it comes to getting even mediocre kids places to play in college.

 

You are a bad, bad man. But, +1.

 

At my first paper, I think the juco cross country coach did recruit out of the newspaper. He had to do it somewhere, since none of the county's high schools had cross country.