Dear dimwit on the phone

Good one today:
"Our girls basketball team is 0-16 this season, but they work so hard," (yes, that's a direct quote). "I'd like to see a story about perseverance and about how they keep playing, despite not winning a game."

I told her that I would bring it up at the next department meeting.

Amazing how some people think not quitting merits some kind of acknowledgment.

 

As far as JV, I don't think it would kill anyone to put a score in the boxscore with the high scorers of the game.
We don't cover JV except when it comes to state championships. Then, if we have no HS stuff going on, we'll cover it. Goes over fairly well and provides some nice background stuff for potential state championship teams down the line.

 

Mississippi is the same way. There's a lot of guys in that league who either didn't make the grade, got overlooked by four-year schools, or just weren't getting the kinds of offers from four-year schools that they'd like. If you're a good player whose best offers are from SWAC schools or D-II programs, it's often a smart move to go to a JUCO for two years, show you can play and see if you can parlay that success into a better deal.

 

It sounds awful, but if you do it right there might be a decent story there. We have a girls program whose wins in the last three or four years can be counted on one hand. If they score 25 points, it's a good night. And yet, if you watch them play they're still hustling, diving for loose balls and playing hard even after the game gets out of hand.
Delving into what makes them tick, what keeps them coming back and how they deal with losing -- and knowing they're probably going to lose, badly -- can make for an interesting feature.
I did that type of story on that girls team this season and it came out pretty well. Got some good, honest answers, too. A couple of the girls said they knew they sucked, but if they didn't play then the program might go away and the people now in junior high (who actually look like they have some talent) wouldn't get a chance.

 

We had a boys team a few years ago that broke about a 90-game losing streak, and that was a fantastic story. But we have teams go 0-fer every year. I loathe the floodgates that open if we do a story on this one.

 

With bigger papers, I can definitely see that. We're smaller, with only four high schools to cover, so it's a little easier for us to pull it off.

 

I got a similar letter at the start of the season wondering if we would do a feature on a newbie girls basketball team, after it won its first game, "because they're gonna be awesome." That was in November. Now its February and they've struggled to get out of the 20s their last two games. Even worse, they won both.

 

When I'm at a game, at least I try to record the JV score. Of course, most readers don't know how damn difficult it is to get the scores in the first place. Here, the large schools play frosh-JV-varsity starting around 4, while for small schools, it's JV girls-JV boys-varsity girls-varsity boys. Nor do they have any idea how much work it takes to write a story, answer phones and emails, and lay out a page on deadline and yadda, yadda, yadda ...

Let's face it, too, most readers don't give a damn if we have the freshman or JV scores or not. It's the parents who are already preparing their spawn's plaque for Cooperstown/Canton/Springfield that make the most noise.

 

THIS!

 

The sad truth is that in many, if not all of these cases, what gets overlooked time and time again is how hard these kids work.

 

We try to put the final score of subvarsity games at the end of the varsity box score. In the district that includes our big local schools, the JV boys play in the auxiliary gym while the varsity girls game is going on in the main gym, then the JV girls play at the same time as the varsity boys.

While it's easy to get the JV boys score when the JV coach comes in for the varsity game, the JV girls finish and leave before the varsity boys are done. At the last home game, I asked four JV girls what their score was (coaches were long gone) and got four different answers.

 

He's right. At one of our weeklies, I did a story on a girls lacrosse team that went 0-for-their first two seasons and was hoping to get a win in season three. They lost a game they should have won on a Friday - which I was there for - and then had to cover their next game against the worst team in the state. They won and we covered it like a state title - Gamer, Column and a sidebar on the game and if they thought that was their last chance. Came in second at the state awards for "Sports Story" and the judges said they liked the packaging of the stories.