Dear dimwit on the phone

Some reader e-mailed us to complain that we didn't list the local baseball team in first place when we ran the first MLB standings of the season... and everyone was 0-0.

The sad thing is our SE would've agreed with him.

 

One of my standing rules is that we never run standings where everyone is 0-0. Waste of space.

 

Agreed. For preseasons, I'll run scores and schedules, but only run standings at the end of the preseason. Premise is: the games don't count, so what difference does it make what the standings are? Preseason is all about player evaluation.

 

That's my excuse for never covering JV/freshman sports on down. The wins don't matter, it's about learning the game and evaluating talent for the varsity.

 

This.

 

No shit. If you are covering JV sports, you either have your priorities out of whack or work at a VERY small paper.

 

But the scholarships!!!! YOU FUCKERS ARE COSTING THEM SCHOLARSHIPS!!!

 

Some old guy called multiple numbers multiple times to complain that we weren't covering our baseball team's spring training like we would the regular season, and threatened to switch to another paper even though he had no idea what their spring training coverage was like... or even the names of said papers, for that matter. He was pumped by all the spring training wins and was upset that wasn't the focus of our stories.

 

Or your boss is a fucking idiot.

 

We found a good way to handle JV stuff. We ran a weekly community sports page that included a little bit of everything. So we would do JV results in that. It saved us the hassle of getting the stuff on deadline and the embarrassment of running a Tuesday basketball game in Saturday's section.

 

Please send this to one of the muckety mucks at my paper, who has pushed for us to start covering middle school sports for the past two years because his stepson is a middle school athlete ...

 

A weekly community sports page is great for this stuff. yes, it's a lot of work to edit and put together. But it gives you a place to put your middle school and JV stuff, the swim team meet, the local runners' club events and triathlons, power lifting, cycling races, rugby club and every other offbeat sport in the world without sacrificing valuable space you want to devote to important stuff.

We'd set a 6 pm deadline on Monday for submissions (text and photos). I'd compile and edit the stuff (most of which came via email) and we'd run the page in Wednesday's edition, when we had adequate space and not much happening locally. It gave people a chance to send in their stuff that happened over the weekend and not be too stale by Wednesday's edition. I'd edit the stuff down to make it fit and we'd run photos as space allowed (but never promised to anyone). Readers loved it and our chief editors loved it, too.