Dear dimwit on the phone

Not that you need my permission, but, rant on!

 

And while I'm on a roll, dear dimwit on Facebook:
You want all the football scores for the last two weeks? Here's a link to our home page. Look them up yourself. Having had only two days off in the last two weeks, I'm watching the 49ers today, and making fun of people like you on sportsjournalists.com.

 

Yeah, how else is that precious little snowflake going to get 1/8th of his/her college paid for?

 

Why they give scholarships for that stuff is beyond me.

 

Dear swim mom,
I have no idea what was confusing about saying I can interview your kid "at 4 tomorrow." I don't know why you responded with "4 p.m. today?" There really is little ambiguity about the word "tomorrow."

 

Dear middle school girls' basketball mom:
I'm sorry you're going through a nasty divorce and your daughter had to transfer schools this year. I really am. Divorce sucks; been there, done that.

But I will not run a correction from last week, when you think your daughter "scored the team's first four points" and you think it'll help her self-esteem for her to be "properly recognized" in the paper. She scored the first two, and that's it. I've double- and triple-checked my notes and even emailed your daughter's coach to quadruple-check. Your daughter scored two points and that's what I reported.

Thanks for emailing,
KYSW

 

What is so hard about calling the opposing coach to get the goal scorers, assuming you have time?

 

If the opponent is not in your area, and later at night, you probably don't have a cell number or any way to contact them. For larger papers, taking that extra step for a couple dozen schools is also a colossal pain in the ass even if it's only a couple of minutes per call.

 

What Batman said. I know I rarely had the time to chase stuff on deadline. Too many other things to deal with and still beat the clock.

If I was going to call people, it had to be really important --- like libel-level --- stuff, not first names of teenagers that an opposing manager couldn't bother to write down.

 

Depends on how many schools you have in your coverage area, doesn't it? In the case discussed hereabouts, I was able to rustle up the info from the other team's coaches. Point it, I shouldn't have to.

 

I always loved the coaches at our outlying schools, who would religiously call in every last stat and everything we needed when they won their game, but always seemed to lose our number when they lost a game. And this was in a coverage area where we took phone boxes from 100-plus schools, so we wouldn't have time to chase down these outliers.

Finally our SE got their calls (wins) a few times in a row, and said something like, "Wow, you guys seem to be winning every game. Do we need to push to get you in the state rankings? What's your record now?"

The coach said it was something like 8-10, and the SE started to get after him. He finally said, "Coach, congrats on the win. That's great. But just remember this: If you can't call us after you lose a game, don't bother calling us after you win a game."

 

A former colleague of mine called it 'coach getting the red ass'. Whatever that meant.

Another place I worked would run the game "Podunk at Bum Creek, no report: No information was provided by the visiting Fighting Coons on their scheduled game at Bum Creek." I thought that was needlessly embarrassing them.

But Burns' SE is right: if you want us to help YOU with publicizing your team, covering games, doing stories, etc., then you need to at least meet us halfway by providing us the information we need.

This sort of stuff reminds me why I ditched high school sports.