Dear dimwit on the phone

A few years back, I embarked on an ambitious project. I reviewed every single football game story ever written in our small town's paper. The goal was to compile a high school football record book for our county, which at any given time has had 4-6 teams. I ended up spending an afternoon or two at the library, and scanning through microfilm at the office for an hour or so after deadline, for about six months.
Finally finished it, reviewing every game story I could find back to the early 1920s. I compiled team and coaches' records, touchdown records and yardage records. Damn near went insane doing it. I checked and rechecked stuff, and sometimes checked it a third and fourth time when I thought I might have missed something or found a slight inconsistency.
Near as I can tell, I now treat this thing as gospel. It's as good as we're going to get.
At the end of it, we ran the full and complete record book along with a story explaining the methodology of the research. Over the last five years, it's become the basis for a ton of follow-up stories and even game stories as some of the records were broken.
I'm pretty damn proud of it.

So anyway, a year or two later some guy's kid is closing in on the career passing record. He's touting his kid's achievements, and rightfully so. The record was more than 30 years old. It was quite a feat to even approach it.
And then the kid finishes about 200 yards short.
The guy's tune changes. We start getting e-mails thanking us for the coverage, and hinting that the reason the kid didn't get the record was because the coaches changed their playcalling to feature fewer passes as he got closer to the mark.
Later on, on a statewide high school sports message board, there's a thread about football records. I made a post mentioning my project and what we had published. This guy goes on there and says it's all bunk, because there's no way to verify any of it.
First, he insinuated that we made it all up. He wanted to see our work. I told him exactly how I did it and that he was welcome to spend the next six months at the library if he wanted to verify it. I welcomed him, even challenged him, to do it.
Then he changed course and said that because there's no film of the older games, there's no way to prove what was printed in those old game stories is accurate and thus none of it can be trusted as fact. Basically, saying everything we've printed in the paper for the past 100 years is utter bullshit.
After again politely explaining the research methods I used, that the old game stories were as close to historical record as there is, and that he's welcome to build a time machine and travel back to doublecheck our stats, I decided it was time to stop feeding the troll.
A couple years later, another guy came along and obliterated the longstanding record anyway, and we made a big deal of it. Didn't hear a peep from the guy. Go figure.

 

Damn. I'm in awe of anyone who is that dedicated to embark on such an ambitious project. If you did it on your own time/dime, triple kudos to you.

I remember from my days as an SID how hard it was to go back through records of the 1950s and 60s to research statistical stuff. Pretty challenging. The further back one goes, the harder it is to ascertain accuracy of the data.

I would have asked this pinhead if he had any evidence to show your research was anything sort of legit.

 

Finished typing in stats for all-state nominees this week. I'm a floored at how many coaches turn in an average for little Jimmy of .400 only to add up stats and see it's like .296 or .308... why?
Because in the section for Hits, 2B, 3b and HR, they don't include the extra base hits as part of the hits...
At least this year, I didn't get some dumbass who counted plate appearances as at-bats
I've said it for years: Spring sports coaches are, collectively, the dumbest group on the planet.

 

Thanks for the props. It most definitely was not on my own time/dime, though. I basically used it as a way to justify a paycheck during the slower periods of the high school season, around Christmas and in the summer. We've gotten so much mileage out of it, though, that it's become an incredibly worthwhile project.
Besides the records, I ended up doing a series of stories on the history of high school football in the town. And last year we had a ton of records broken among all of our teams. It was a dominant theme for a season when a lot of them stunk, so it was nice to have something positive to write about instead of the latest drubbing. We probably wrote 20-30 stories during the season that included some part of that research.
And if nothing else, it was incredibly educational. Now I feel like a real authority on the subject.

I actually did tell the pinhead to check my facts if he didn't believe what was published. Told him when the library was open and where to find the microfilm, or show me anything that showed they were wrong. If I was inaccurate, I would've gladly corrected it. Surprisingly, to the best of my knowledge he never accepted the challenge.

 

We had a basketball coach call in his season stats earlier this year. Through 10 games, he says. First player — 176 points, 18.3 average. I asked him if a kid played less than 10 games. "No, I do my averages based on quarters played. Some kids don't play every quarter, so they shouldn't have their stats counted as a full game."

I don't know what kept me from laughing.

 

oh c'mon, you're selling the rest of the coaches short. they're just as capable of being dumb.

 

I would hope this was on your paper's time, or they gave you OT, unless you really, really had a burning desire to volunteer your time.

My nutty volunteer story came when I worked as the one-man SE at the small-town daily. A couple of years in, the local school's AD comes up with the idea of having a town sports Hall of Fame, with a big dinner, and awards and stuff like that. She puts a call out for volunteers. My editor and I decide it sounds like a pretty good story, so I go to the first meeting.

Maybe 10 people show up, and I'm taking some notes. The topic of research comes up on deciding who can be elected. AD looks at me, and says, "Hey Baron, you can do the research, right?"

I told her I had to ask my editor because it could be a conflict of interest, plus, I wasn't sure I had the time for it. AD and a few others give me dirty looks. My editor agreed it was a conflict of interest, with a little prodding from myself because I really didn't want to devote hours of my own time to researching the shit. Next meeting, I go to report for my paper, AD asks me again, I tell her my editor said I couldn't, and more dirty looks from the now-half-dozen people there.

Hall of Fame never got off the ground. Which means, in addition to preventing kids from getting scholarships, I prevented old-timers from becoming Hall of Famers

 

Baron, I think you may have just become a patron saint of SportsJournalists.com.

 

The weird thing is that I get none of these e-mails, even though I haven't been covering as much lately, as you've noted. For whatever reason though, you guys get plenty of complaints, plus get painted as being in favor of Local Private School. My suspicion with your southern most paper is that the news product is so poor, the only people reading it are for the sports, so therefore you might have a larger audience on that anyway.

 

Yeah, I'm thinking that's the case. It could also be that these parents realize we're the only place that's going to cover them as the state daily isn't even going to mention they exist unless they win a title/have a scandal and the other newspaper has scaled back to, maybe, covering three games a week.

I appreciate the passion from them. I just hate that the only time we get emails from people is when they want to bitch about the coverage. We never hear good things. Ever.

I get that that's the business but, still, Would it have killed them to email us thanking for the coverage last year if it was so good they're pissed we're not matching it this year?