Dear dimwit on the phone

If you don't care, and it's not relevant, why not just tell her that? This stuff should never be in a paper anyway.

 

If the coach and the parent want to write headlines, tell them to buy their own newspaper or to create a new one out of scratch.

That actually happened when I first got the job at the small town one-man shop I worked at. A couple of months in, one of the parents started their own sports bi-weekly paper. It had a bunch of results, with every kid's name listed, plus a couple of "They tried hard" stories. They had one staffer for the whole operation. The paper barely lasted a month.

I was told, both by my bosses, as well as the parent/newspaper owner, that the paper had been planned for months before I had come on board, and to not take it personally. Still, it did piss me off, and one time, when the parent wanted something submitted (it really was a newsworthy item, not fluff), I had to grit my teeth to not tell the guy, "Why don't you have the Podunk Fucktard print it. Oh wait, it went out of business."

 

I had a similar experience last month when someone submitted a photo of a youth bowling team that had placed in some state tournament. Of course it went on and on about how hard the kids tried and how some would get scholarships out of it (bowling scholarships???) and the obligatory list of sponsors.

Naturally it got hacked down to a rather bland extended cutline, followed a day or two later by an e-mail wondering why the story didn't appear as they wrote it, and how can they get it in that way? So I let our ad manager know and sent a reply with the manager's e-mail on it. Still haven't seen their ad.

I wonder sometimes if people who submit these fluff-filled articles have actually read the paper and see we don't do stories in that style, or conclude them with "Go, Podunk!"? Or if they've written anything at all beyond a grocery list since high school? If they haven't, then they've got as much business telling me how to edit their "stories" as I do telling my mechanic how to do a tune-up! Some things are best left in the hands of professionals.

 

I won a couple bowling scholarships. Placed second and third in back-to-back years at the national duckpin adult-youth championships.
I'm not even kidding.

 

And there are college bowling teams..

I did a story on a girl in this area years ago that placed in some tournament that got scholarship money for college...

It happens...

 

My alma mater's claim to sports fame is the fact that the girl's bowling team finished second in the NCAA tournament a few years ago.....I wish I was kidding but I'm not. And before you ask, yes they are D-1.

 

This happened at my first job, too. A local couple decided our newspaper needed some "competition", so they decided to start their own paper. They hired high school kids to write the sports copy, and let advertisers write stories on their own businesses. A TV reporter who was based in town, who was my ex-girlfriend, did a story on the new paper and kept focusing on how they were going to be the leader in sports coverage in the area, just to take jabs at me.

In the end, that paper went out of business after about 3 months, and ex-girlfriend was fired from her job a few months later (not for this story, but because she thought it was OK to drive one of her station's cars to a job interview, and it was sideswiped by a hit-and-run driver).

 

Great stuff. If that ain't a whole fistful of karma ...

 

Of course, I would never doubt a fellow SportsJournalists.com member on the validity of bowling scholarships. The parents of little Johnnie or Janie Tenpins is a different matter, however!

 

Yeah, they do give bowling scholarships. (Why I have no idea!) I covered a high school kid years ago who got one. Why in Hades someone is giving a college scholarship for BOWLING is something only gender equity freaks would ever comprehend.

 

I can only imagine the satisfaction of seeing an angry reader start a rival paper only to find out just how hard it is to run one or put out something of quality before failing miserably.

 

The D-II I used to cover had women's bowling. It's a great way for low-budget schools to help shore up their Title IX numbers without spending a whole lot of money. The overhead for bowling is almost nothing.