Dear dimwit on the phone

GameNight tab pages are 10 inches by 10 inches. Usually designed over four columns.

 

See also: Tennis coaches, volleyball coaches, cross country coaches ... name the season, they're all the same.

 

It's not really on deadline, but we like to get it done as soon as we can Friday night so we don't have to come back in early every Saturday.

 

First "Why don't you run the betting lines" call of the season. We've never run them, probably never will.

 

Was it a certain former sports editor from one of the biggest papers in the state? That guy will call a few times a year, first to wonder why his old paper doesn't run the betting lines; then to complain about said paper; then to remind me he used to be the sports editor there back in the 60s or 70s; and then to wish me a blessed day after a few minutes of me saying, "Uh huh," "Yep," and "I dunno," whilst idly typing on my computer.

 

No, this was a civilian.

 

We've had our fall football preview special section out for a couple weeks now. On the front, we have the three area high school running backs. They're looking at the camerea with the typical football tough guy scowl, because they're tough and that's the image they want to portray. I got a call the other day from a disgruntled member of our community. He said he hates seeing that picture whenever he looks at it. He doesn't understand why we made them look mean. "What's wrong with having smiling football players?" he said. I told him we didn't make them look tough, and that they probably wanted to convey the image that they're tough young men. "Well they don't look tough to me, they just look pissed. Next time, you need to reconsider the pictures you run." I said we will certainly consider it in the future (we won't) and I appreciated his call (I didn't).

tl;dr - Some guy thinks football players should look happy in pictures and doesn't like when we run pictures where they don't look happy.

 

Dear Dimwit,
We're a weekly with a pretty small sports section that has to find room to fill 16 high school sports and three college programs. Three of those 19 sports are football. So, no. We're not going to make it out to your middle school cross country meet — which you told us about with a day's notice when we already had two or three other sports going at the same time — and we're not going to do a story on your daughter because she wants to be an anesthesiologist when she grows up.

 

Whenever a game gets delayed, why is there always someone who calls to complain that our TV listing is wrong?

Hell, one time some lady called to complain that a tennis tournament wasn't on ESPN even though we never said it was... because it was airing on a different channel!

 

Taking over sports coverage for one of our small weeklies in the ever expanding world of more duties/same hours.

The school has a league champion volleyball team that started out this year with a sweep over a school from a higher division, so we led off the section with that.

The complaints rolled in for the next few days because we played that over the football team, which was 1) on the road; 2) playing nonleague and 3) lost by 50.

I get the feeling people in this town don't want to read about girls sports

 

BTW...I've been off this site for almost a year now...happy to come back and see this thread still going strong as ever ;D

 

Well of course it it....the number of idiots grows daily. Welcome back!