Dear dimwit on the phone

They are cutting the Sunday print section? Wow.

Every place I've been, the Sunday paper is the one that is the most untouchable. I'd think Monday-Tuesday-Saturday would be ones to go before Sunday.

 

She's peeking in your bedroom window right now.

 

I can't believe people don't know the drill by now. Their precious kids are not going to be covered very well at all. It's a new era and newspapers thanks to the suits (I'll blame them today more than the subscribers; I don't blame them for dropping the tiny fishrag) are on their last legs. We're just not going to cover local youth sports very well any more. The clicks aren't there and the bodies to cover those sports have been laid off.

 

Speaking of "I don't think he heard a word I said, he was so keyed up to get his obviously rehearsed complaint to my ears..."

 

Time to rescue this topic for the start of fall sports season. And, unfortunately, this one's on the collective us, from what I'm seeing on teh Twitterez.

Dear dimwit prep writers,
It's the opening of the SEASON, not the preseason. There's the league season and nonleague games which are definitely not as important as league games, unless its an OOC game matching state or national powerhouses, otherwise ...

 

Depends where you live. 'Round here, games that count don't start 'til after Labor Day.

I'm still sorting through all the division champions who think they won the conference... which isn't actually possible in most sports.

 

I'm now in Texas, and I've been to a pair of football "scrimmages." Basically just drills - punting, 1s vs. 2s for each team, reverse that, then 1s vs. 1s and ending with a 12-minute quarter with running clock. This sort of stuff is usually just done privately in Rhode Island, where I came from, but out here its open to the public. Now that I'm "smart" to this though, it basically just serves as a launching point for the season preview story.

 

This is one of my two biggest pet peeves from California preps. If the games count toward your record and, in turn, affects playoff berths/seedings, it is part of the real season.

The other one is more exclusive to Southern California. Unless you are actually going to state playoffs, you are not "going to CIF." You are playing in your section playoffs. This is especially dumb for sports that don't have state playoffs.

 

Do you prep writers out there have to deal with the "Week Zero" designation for the opening games like they do in California.

One of the prep writers at our hometown paper wrote a preseason column complaining about that. ("It's the first week of the season, call it Week 1, dangit")

 

My state has an actual two-week preseason for private schools, and one week for publics.
The first week, private school teams (which are in their own association) are allowed to play competitive scrimmages. Most of those are controlled, with teams going some variation of 10 plays on offense, 10 on defense, and then repeat.
Week two is a "jamboree" where a bunch of teams get together at a central location and play two quarters against one or two other teams. Some of these things have 15 or 20 teams involved and go on for hours.
One of our local schools hosted a scrimmage the first week. I covered it because it was the first real sign of football and it gave me something for the section on the other side of the weekend. Our news editor was pushing for us to go full bore with it, with photo galleries and same-night coverage. I was just like, "Dude. It's a scrimmage. It's practice."

 

I think it switched a couple of years ago. There was definitely a time when Week 0 was a thing. It was available to teams that wanted a bye-week built into the season, otherwise you went 10 weeks straight. Now I believe (some?) sections are calling it Week 1.

 

We had to deal with it this year, but it's more of a simplification thing. And a welcome one at that.
The private school association has an odd number of teams in it and was having trouble balancing out its schedule. So it got about a dozen to play last week and gave them all a bye week later in the season, which somehow made the whole thing work out. It was only seven or eight games around the state, though. Everybody else was still doing the preseason jamborees and starting this week. I was having to explain to people around town that, yes, one of our local private schools is playing an actual game. So it kind of made sense to call that Week Zero and this Week 1, just to keep everything on the same page.

My big pet peeve is calling it "fall camp/practice" when these days it should be "preseason camp/practice." We're going to be two weeks into the season by Labor Day, and halfway through when the calendar actually turns to fall. High school teams started practicing at the end of July or the first of August. They do mandatory heat timeouts every quarter until Week 8 for God's sake.That ain't fall.