Dear dimwit on the phone

Lisrimgs go great with covfefe.

 

We have had COACHES make similar complaints in the past. Both good teams, football and cross country. What it came down to for us is football plays half of their games at home, while cross country never ran within our coverage area.

 

We deal with that as well. Almost as big an issue is when cross country runs -- at 8 or 9 a.m. Saturday morning, after I got home at 2:30 or 3 a.m from football the night before.
Sorry, folks. That ain't happening.

 

I always appeased cross country by making sure I got in touch with coaches for results. I think they got it that it was inherently difficult to sit there and watch a meet that would be way out of town or had runners going into the hills. So they were great about getting me times and comments and I'd eventually do features on the top runners who were competing for sectionals. Occasionally I'd pop over if they were local and snap photos of the end of one race and the beginning of another. My biggest issue was always juggling the school everyone wanted to read about with the small ones only a handful cared about.

 

Our paper takes pics at a variety of events every season — football, golf, volleyball, tennis, soccer, basketball, wrestling, swimming, track, baseball, softball.
We have bylined and roundup stories on football each week.
We'll do bylined stories a few times each week on basketball, baseball and softball. The closer the event is to the office, the better.
Roundups on all the others unless it's something special, like a league meet or the postseason. Luckily, we can find much of the cross country, track and wrestling stuff online.
We used to cover more regular season events in person, but things like less staff and earlier deadlines over the past few years have made it more and more difficult. The days of driving 90 minutes away for a mid-week, non-conference game or meet ended a long time ago.
I know many in the general public are too dumb to realize two things about football vs. all the other sports:
1) Generally speaking, more people care about football than any other sport. Basketball can be a close second, school by school, but the driving force is almost always football.
2) Football is once a week while the other sports compete multiple times each week. Like economics, supply and demand drive the market.

 

We get a lot of coverage questions from the SID of the local D2 school. The school has a decent following, but our online numbers show that those stories just don't get the same number of clicks as prep sports. I've tried to push coverage of the school from gamers and previews (essentially regurgitated press releases, without quotes) to more features, but publisher/ME is pushing our sports staff more toward slashing coverage altogether, which doesn't jive with the SID.

Admittedly, I'm biased as an alum of the school. I don't necessarily get to make those overarching decisions, as my involvement is more in design over coverage decisions. But I've been at the paper longer than almost anyone in the newsroom, and I feel like I have a good read on the region and what could help the coverage.