Dear dimwit on the phone

If it has a city edition, then, yes, it should run the agate. I'd be willing to bet that paper has more than two editions. I could see a scenario where KC has a regional edition and maybe two local editions -- Kansas and Missouri. Of course, I might lose said bet.

I wouldn't put it online. Print only. I don't disagree that if you do the work, someone should pay for it.

Like someone else said above, explain to them you don't have the staff, spend 20 minutes on the phone the coach, getting the details, writing a two-graf brief and boxscore and put it in the local edition.

If you work at paper with dwindling circulation numbers, it's certainly in your best interest to try new things.

I apologize for the "arrogant" comment. That's certainly not what I meant. But when I read about nosediving circulation numbers and people not doing everything they possibly can to get more news into the paper, I sometimes get a little reactive.

 

JV state championships? How do they work that? How do you determine which players are eligible to play in the JV tournament? Can they be players who get SOME varsity time? Is there a limit? Not criticizing, just intrigued.

 

Dear Soccer Kid,

Thanks for admitting that you were going to sign your National Letter of Intent on Feb. 1, and that you'd have a blank sheet of paper in front of you at your school's photo op later in the week. I particularly love that you're trying to get all the signees to do the same thing because you actually understand how silly it is.

Blank paper for everyone!

PaperDoll

P.S. Moms of Non-Scholarship Soccer Kids, read the full story on our website before you call and yell at me. Your kid's right there.

 

IIRC, how much you play on the varsity level vs. junior varsity matters. i.e. If a kid has started every game on varsity and played just a couple halves of JV, he can't play in the JV tournament. It used to be a big problem with a couple schools, who would stack the JV team just for the tournament.

 

Tangent to letters of intent: If the kid isn't getting an athletic scholarship, is the letter of intent just for show? Is the only reason the letter of intent has meaning is because it secures scholarship money?

 

Signing day. At the risk of topic drift, how could we forget this one:

http://www.rgj.com/article/20080207/PREPSPORTS/802070361/Fernley-s-Hart-admits-fabricating-story

and the folo:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_gene&id=3236039

 

Accepted with apologies for unnecessary snark on my part. It's clear we don't see things the same way here, so I propose agreeing to disagree.

But I'm not talking about not running JV (or freshmen) at all. I guess what I'm really talking about is what seemed perfectly fine for five or six years suddenly isn't good enough for one person, who's trying to tell me he represents a wave of interest. And I guess that's what really bothered me, particularly after seeing many JV parents this season who haven't expressed to me that they feel like the JV is being underserved.

While I was talking about this with my managing editor, I remembered an incident that happened shortly after I took over here. I decided to break out the JV and freshman games from paragraphs at the end of the varsity articles and put them in a box on the page, figuring that would get them some better notice. Three days later, a letter comes in from an irate parent who rants about how I screw over the freshmen and JV teams and sent a clip of my new frosh/JV box idea circled with an orange highlighter and "PRIME EXAMPLE!" written on it. And back then, there was more info in those boxes since our pages hadn't started shrinking yet.

And that was when I realized that it's impossible to make everyone happy.

 

I have seen this line of thinking twice:

******
Like someone else said above, explain to them you don't have the staff, spend 20 minutes on the phone the coach, getting the details, writing a two-graf brief and boxscore and put it in the local edition.

*****

That's not why I don't run them.

I make this choice on an ethical basis, because JV and freshman games are played to help the kids learn the game.

There's a huge difference between that and varsity games.

Heck, I have a lot less of a problem with youth football or Little League tournaments than jv and freshman games.

 

agreed

 

Thirded. The way I see it, almost everything below high school varsity is for developmental purposes. At my old place, I covered some California schools that were pretty serious about their JV teams (they handed out JV league titles in sports and basically held all freshmen and sophomores on the JV teams as SOP), but even then we treated it like every other sub-varsity team: final score and leading scorer in the agate.

The lone pertinent exception I've found to date: youth all-star baseball/softball. Those teams are trying to develop wins, and they're treated accordingly.

 

Dear Mother of Jilted Senior on Cellar-Dwelling Team,

My job isn't to drop everything for the seniors on Senior Night. I interviewed the high scorer because, well, the seniors did absolutely nothing on the night I covered the game. Depending on which game you're referring to, the high scorer also had either eight steals (girls) or 15 rebounds (boys). A kid getting 14 points and 15 rebounds on a winless squad (in league anyway) against one of the top teams in the state is commendable, and he was thus commended. Throw in an early deadline and a computer that took a dump while I was on site, forcing me to drive 25 miles back on deadline, and it was get the best player and get out.

Also, if they were so important, then their combined stats would have far exceeded these:
GIRLS (3 seniors, 2 called up from JV for this game): 4 pts (2-5 FG), 2 reb, 3 ast, 3 stl
BOYS (3 seniors): 14 pts (5-18 FG), 9 reb, 2 ast, 4 stl

Thanks for reading

—Petrie