Dear dimwit on the phone

I had a coach call me last year to say he had a kid signing and could I be there at 8:15 a.m. the next day. I said no. He offered to change the time to 1:30 and that was fine. Don't get me started about how many dumbasses call early in the morning and bitch about not being able to talk to somebody in sports.

 

One school in our area had three kids sign during the early period, but the AD said he'd prefer to hold the ceremony on the first LOI day in Feb, with the rest of the seniors. It worked for me, since that AD is a good guy and we were overbooked. Naturally, one set of parental units called and complained we weren't there for THE signing.

 

One local school's athletic director asks -- well, OK, he gets a coach to ask -- when to have the ceremony. I appreciated the thought, but it feels odd. Shouldn't that be determined by the family's schedule?

I need a more polite way to explain to parents that the D-III kids (or non-football Patriot League, or Ivy League) kids are not signing anything.

We are not attending any ceremonies this year. I've got my fingers crossed that our very few big-time signees' schools send decent photos. I will not ask if they're real. We have had more than one photo -- including one ceremony we attended -- where the kid has a blank sheet of paper in front of her because the actual NLI was already signed and returned.

 

I've supplied the blank sheet of paper before. Most of the kids in my area do good just to sign D-III offers, so when one signs an actual NLI, it's news.

 

I got to be the dimwit this morning. Called our local Juco to see if they were had, or were planning to, put out a list of their signees. Get the SID's voicemail, and as the phone is ringing I'm pulling up their website — which, sure enough, has a list of signees on it.
I ended up getting discombobulated and left this long, rambling message that will probably make the SID think I'd been drinking heavily before I called. On top of it, I dropped the receiver, so there's probably a clatter at the end of it.
Not my finest moment, for sure.

 

So how high up do you rank semi-pro sports teams that have more players than audience members in a city with multiple pro sports teams and DI-DII colleges? And what legitimate agate would you have cut down to make room for semi-pro agate they can't even get right?

 

Nobody gives a damn about us media types. In fact, it might be considered a not-so-subtle way to punish us for being such obnoxious whatevers in their eyes.

 

Sort of like a flea on an elephant. More of a nuisance than anything else.

Once upon a time, Podunk had a semipro team. About a month into the season, got a call from the team's PR person (a 17-year-old high school kid) telling us the team was being forced to fold and the rest of the schedule would be cancelled. Rarely have I witnessed such unbridled joy in the newsroom.

 

Most of our coaches are pretty good about scheduling these things at reasonable hours, they try not to conflict with other schools, and they understand that we only go out on signing day for Division I signings.

Except for one asshat coach who got pissed because we couldn't make his school's signing, which was the same time as one I was doing with a D-1 who was signing with and one our other writer was doing at a school that had seven kids signing (3 D-1s). Turns out this guy only had one signee -- his son ... who was signing with a juco.

 

How you cover it depends on what sort of paper you have. If you're a 10,000 circ. paper with 1-2 signees, then it's a big deal.

If you are a major metro or semi-metro with 20-30 or more signees at more than a dozen different schools, then perhaps your stories are broader in nature.

 

Had this happen last season, except the signing got changed to the afternoon and I didn't know it till I walked into the office and the AD told me. So I wound up driving 30 minutes to one of our other schools for a kid who was signing with Navy. I didn't mind going to the other school, but it sure would've been nice to sleep longer.

 

If they can't get it right, I wouldn't run it and I wouldn't sweat it.

But I would run the schedule and be willing to take linescores if they had their shit together.