Dear dimwit on the phone

I'm sure we've all had these calls which, of course, drive us crazy, but I actually had one once that turned into a couple of good stories:

Got woken up at home one morning at 5:30 a.m., (which left me grumbling about having my number listed, although this was only one of three calls I'd every gotten at home. Most people were actually respectful).

It was a woman, who was very excited. She'd just received a call from Make-A-Wish, inviting her sick teenage son to a ballgame at local MLB stadium and meet some of the players. Apparently, some other Make-A-Wish kid canceled, and our local family got the call. Only, they basically had to leave in 15 minutes in order to get to the stadium on time.

So I throw on some clothes, run over to the woman's house, get some quick info from them on the kid, take a couple pics of the kid in his room with his posters of the MLB stars, and then say goodbye to them. If video was around at the time, it would have been a pretty good video.

Kid goes to ballpark, meets stars, then a couple days later, I talk to them again for a follow-up, and used one of their photos of the kid with the stars.

 

A bit of a tangent, but it builds of HanSen's post. Has anyone else's baseball teams started using the Gamechanger app and website yet?
This thing is wonderful. Basically, it's a cheaper version of Gametracker. It's an iPhone scorekeeping app. It uploads the stats and play-by-play to the website (gamechanger.io), and you can keep up with it in real time.
Coaches like it because they can also upload the final stats to MaxPreps straight from the app. I like it because it's eliminated the need to track down a half-dozen coaches on deadline, and you can get exactly what you need. The downside is, some of the feeds require a subscription to get the "full" stats (it's something like $35 or $40 per year) and the website has been twitchy this spring.

If you're covering high school baseball, though, you should definitely check that link and see if your teams have a feed or two (in our area, some parents are also using it). It can definitely make all of our lives easier.

 

Nothing like the start of spring like explaining what we need in term of track results to what is either a new coach, a new assistant coach, a parent that "wants to help" or a student manager.
Seriously, look at the newspaper and figure it out.

 

I live in upstate New York, and if the pocal paper didn't print the Red Sox schedule, I would be annoyed as all heck.

 

These conversations always seem to end one of two ways for me.

1) "Oh, I understand. Thanks for letting me know why the scores haven't been in the paper. I'll remind our coach to call in from now on." Of course, it goes without saying you don't hear from that coach after that.

2) "What? You need them to call in their own scores? You're reporters and you expect someone to do your job for you? You need to learn how to do your job."

 

I can't tell anyone to look at the newspaper, because we haven't gotten any track results yet. That's why I sent out an e-mail template which the coaches can type on after every meet.

Wish I could've made it a reusable PDF, but I'm not that technologically sophisticated.

 

Surprised they don't put their stuff on athletic.net, which seems to be all the rage nowadays. Or do they?

 

I didn't know the site existed 'til now, so thanks for the tip!

There don't seem to be a lot of in-state teams who have signed up. But our dual-meet season doesn't start 'til tomorrow.

Not that it matters, 'cause if the results aren't e-mailed to me in a reasonably consistent format -- which I e-mailed to every coach yesterday -- I probably won't have time to clean 'em up for publication. I didn't pull results from the competition's website during the winter 'cause I found too many obvious errors, and I won't pull results off that site either... not until I can prove it's (usually) accurate.

Most of our big meets get posted on Milesplit, but that can take days.

 

Same here. One of these days, I'll explain to them how I used watch the four baseball games that all started at 4 p.m. simultaneously in the company helicopter, but it was sold during the last downsizing.

 

As backward as Kentucky is -- Cay-uts win, lets burn couches in the street, y'all -- getting track and cross country results hasn't been a problem for about a decade.

When I started as a sports assistant/secretary as a teenager in the spring of 2000, I remember the days of taking all 18 track & field events over the phone. Thirty-six if there were both genders and you had a local kid in every event.

Circa 2002, the coaches' listserve began and everything changed. Pre-meet rosters and performance lists for easy download and very rarely do you have to wait more than two hours after major meets for results to be posted. Even weekday all-comers are posted that night (or the next morning).

Couple that with kytrackxc.com (Kentucky's milesplit site) and it makes it easy to look up PRs/finishes for kids for features/previews/recaps.

As far as baseball and softball, coaches are required to call scores in to the KHSAA's scoreboard. If they're not posted that night, ADs, principals and coaches get phone calls/texts/emails early the next morning.

There's been plenty of times -- OK, usually it's when the local team loses -- that the score might not have been relayed to us, but at least it was on the official scoreboard.

When I'm doing the agate page, I try to run the prep baseball/softball scores each night. Easy to do a search-and-replace and most of the time, the scores are in A-B-C order by winning team anyway. Coaches and parents appreciate it and you don't have to dedicate much space/time to it.

Also helps them that we're a six-day daily that covers zero pro teams and few college teams, so we're preps, preps, preps and more preps when it comes to locally written sports news.

 

those damn pocal papers

 

Clearly, I need a fricking editor.