Dear dimwit on the phone

There are a couple of states who hold fast pitch softball in the fall. I've worked in two of them: Colorado and Oklahoma. And the latter one has slow-pitch softball (in the spring, of course).

 

Nowadays the coach that calls us is rare ... since so many email in results, or send us links to their Maxpreps page.

But that said ...

Dear dimwit mom keeping the scorebook: Don't point out to me everything your spawn does in the game. It's annoying. And, once you take a seat at the scorer's table, you're no longer acting as a parent. And don't ask if the guy with all the camera gear is "my" photragpher. I don't own him. He works for the Podunk Press.

 

Parents like that are the worst.

Had one at my former shop who, when I was taking the results over the phone, would ask why I never included her kid -- who she always mentioned first, FWIW -- in the writeup. Her kid never did anything noteworthy on a bad volleyball team which, IIRC, won three or four matches that season.

 

Well, she did try just as hard! She probably even got a varsity letter.

 

you can bet an email is going to be a winner when it starts with "I know you don't usually cover junior high sports, but. . ."
Guy writes to tell me all about the junior high soccer team that just won its conference and how their only loss was to a much larger school and all the kids tried really hard and it would mean so much to their parents to see something in the paper.
Only thing he didn't tell me was what school it was.
Or the team's record.
Or really anything else about them.

 

But that's part of the intrigue and mystery. And of course if you don't write him back quickly to ask of this awesome team...well you sir are an asshole!

 

We had a call earlier this week. The caller thought we mistyped something in the volleyball story because the set scores looked off. To quote the person who took the call: "Sir, that's the team's record." He also didn't realize that the story jumped to another page.

Caller suggested that we should run a correction in the next paper. We didn't.

 

Same here. We've gotten to where a lot of our coaches just text me their scores and stats and we go from there. If it's the head coach, I'll shoot them some questions and grab a few quotes via text, and wind up being able to write 10-12 inches off it.
It's especially useful for road games, when coaches would be calling in on a scratchy cell phone from the hinterlands, or from a noisy bus where they can't hear anything. It's also nice, on deadline, to be able to keep working in the moments between texts instead of having to stop everything for 10 minutes to take a call.
We'd always had a problem getting our basketball coaches to call us. Last season I tried the text method and got almost 100 percent cooperation with the same coaches. Baseball and softball was about the same rate. People won't pick up the phone anymore, but they'll text like crazy.

 

The same freelancer sends e-mail every week asking why her column hasn't been posted online. Uh, because nobody cares about it?

 

Part of me wonders if it's because coaches feel more comfortable writing/texting their thoughts as opposed to talking. With the latter, they might believe they are saying stuff off the top of their head and then believe they said something they probably shouldn't have. Texting, on the other hand, allows them to go back and edit a thought before sending it along.

And perhaps some of them believe that, if they text, there won't be any issues over being misquoted.

 

How did this fall to page 3, dagnabbit?
Anyway, retired football coach is getting a plaque from the state coaches association for something. I try to get a-hold of him, no dice, just write up a staff report off the press release. Not really shocked, the guy was equally hard to get in touch with when he retired. I still get a couple emails this morning saying I should have played it up bigger and Mr. Barely Above .500 should be worshiped as the hero he is. To top things off, release has him as having finished with fewer wins than Mr. Legendary Coach of the 1950s. I get an email saying that the press release was wrong and he actually had more wins than the guy from the 50s. It turns out this had been a matter of some debate concerning what year exactly the guy in the 50s began his coaching career and so no one really knows how many wins he ended up with and thus, no one knows who finished with more. Evidently some district admin is digging around for 70-year old yearbooks to get to the bottom of this. i await with bated breath.

 

Dear female caller (possibly mother of a player),
No, we don't know who made all-league in soccer. As I just explained to you, the leagues in our area did not send out any information on their selections.
And seeing as how the state finals were held four weeks ago, the league games ended well before that AND tonight is the opening night for boys basketball and the second week of girls basketball, we've moved on to costing kids scholarships in winter sports.