Dear dimwit on the phone

Winter prep sports in KY -- basketball, bowling, swimming, wrestling -- began the Monday after Thanksgiving. Wrestling regionals (the only State qualifier) are this coming Saturday (Feb. 11). Bowling regionals aren't until the week of March 11-17.

For the first time, we'll have regular-season baseball and softball games scheduled before bowling ends. That's a loooong season with a limit of 20 calendar days, I believe. There's no limit to how many games, series, tournaments, etc., a team participates in, only that it can't compete in more than 20 dates.

We had a high school bowling tournament yesterday. It was a hodgepodge of thing that ended with boy-girl doubles (baker).

Gave it the feature treatment (we run most all agate anyway no matter how badly a kid performed or how insignificant the stat was; a local kid can finish 70th in an all-comers swim meet in the 50 free and the kid's name will be in 6 or 7 point on the agate page) because one school took all four individual titles and none of the four winners were close to being favored.

 

Dear guy who emailed me about his new wedding website he launched,

The information was fine, but in the future, please do not include the photo of you with your wife after she just gave birth to your kid. Nothing says "weddings" like a photo of a woman with IVs sticking out of her arms.

 

I wrote a story on Is Cheerleading a Sport topic a few years ago? The cheerleading coach a major Division I program summed it up best when she said, "It's probably not considered a sport because I and other coaches don't want it considered a sport. If it were, NCAA rules would apply. Now, I can practice my kids when I want, where I want and for as long as I want. If we're considered an NCAA sanctioned sport, I wouldn't have that freedom."

Made sense then, makes sense now.

 

Proud mother: My son plays on the 4th-grade boys travel basketball team, and they've gone the whole season undefeated. Is that something you'd be interested in?

Me:Yes, I will include it in our weekly recreation news notebook. If you have information on the team, including any playoff results, and the team members' names, email them to me.

Proud mother: OK.

A few hours later, I got the email. Apparently, this team is 25-0, and it still has all of February and March left in its season.

I send a polite email response, saying that I typically run stories on youth and recreation teams after their season is over and they have won their playoffs and/or tournament.

As a sidenote, am I the only one that thinks this season for 4th-grade boys basketball is inordinately long? 25 games in, and they still have 2 months to go?

 

We have a lot of this in my area. AAU hoops is huge, and I think what happens is that these little kids teams go to tournaments on the weekends where they'll play four or five games in two days. But I'm pretty sure at the younger ages they don't play a 32-minute game the way a high school team does.

But I agree with you, it's total overkill, and I find it awfully hard to be enthusiastic about publishing the stuff. The teams that go to AAU Nationals will easily play 50 games or more by the time those tournaments are over. Interestingly, I just saw an article in Time about how doctors and hospitals have been tracking increased numbers of ACL injuries in youth athletes, and a lot of it has to do with overuse and overtraining. Never mind the psychological aspect of it ... it's taking a physical toll too.

 

This afternoon, a call:

"The word on the street is that the parents would like more about the JV games in the paper than a couple of lines with the score and who led the team in points."

Would you like me to explain to you that putting the JV score in the paper in any form is a luxury? Many papers don't post anything about the JV game at all. So shut up and enjoy what you're getting because if the other papers in this area are any indication, I don't have to put that score in at all.

And, really, "word on the street?" Can I tell you how ridiculous you sounded when you said that? Can I? Huh? Huh? Please let me say it.

 

The goal of freshman and JV is to get better so that you make varsity. It's basically glorified practice. I usually explain this...nicely of course...to parents. They usually agree.
Yes, even a score is a luxury in a newspaper.
The last paper I worked at took BOXSCORES!!! For even as low as 6th/7th grade! Drove me nuts.

 

My shop does that. Boxes down to middle school. MISERY.

 

Call them back if their kid makes the varsity and ask if they feel the same way.

 

In my first few years as a sports writer, somehere between 2000 and 2003, we would get the book stuff (score by quarters, points, fg total, ft-fta and 3 totals and who made them) from JV games ONLY if they were immediately before a varsity game. The JV summaries would be in 7 pt on the agate page.

If we were bylining a soccer or volleyball match or baseball/softball game and JV was played before, we'd have one line about the score of the game ("In the earlier JV game, Podunk West beat Podunk East, 3-2.")

That being said, we have a once-a-week youth/outdoors page where we include basketball summaries from anything from fourth-grade travel basketball, leading scorers in junior pro/little league to summaries for seventh- and eighth-grade middle school hoops teams (we cover the final of the eight-team league tournament, which is mostly the feeder schools to the high schools in the same district).

FWIW, not sure it would be a bad idea to run a composite list of JV/freshman summaries/scores on say Monday on the agate page. But coaches/schools would have to be informed that these better be emailed in a copy-and-paste format. Nothing dropped off. Nothing faxed. Nothing over the phone or texted.

But I'm also in a seven-school area for high schools. Lot easier/doable than the metros.

 

Actually, I thought of this today and I may actually say this next time (Well, I probably won't, but if I could....):

"If you want me to cover the JV team exactly the same way as the varsity, here's what I will have to do. First, since both JV teams play at the same time, there are times when I'll have to go to the other gym to cover the boys' game. This means I might not be at the girls' varsity game when it starts. What if your girl gets into the first couple of minutes of the varsity game and I miss it because the boys' JV game went into overtime?

"Second, if you want me to cover the JV exactly like the varsity, what that means is that all the good things go in the story ... and all the bad things. I hope your girl isn't the one who misses the game-tying free-throw with no time left on the clock.

"And that kind of scrutiny is not what JV players deserve. If, like most other people seem to believe, the players are actually motivated and/or devastated by what's in the paper, then covering the JV teams equally would actually be a bad thing. But if that's what you want...."

 

But they would say yes ... and complain if you call our their kid for doing anything remotely bad.