For $40.....

Most high school press boxes are inadequate and most high school athletic directors haven't the first clue how to prioritize seating.

 

Fair point. But the point stands, there are ways to get the job done in a timely matter without being a curmudgeon. Yeah it's not ideal, but that's life. Preparation still can go a long way.

 

But preparation has to count for time worked. Making a call to see where you can do your work, getting there in enough time to find space and set up, finding any other resources to make sure you can get the job done. Heck, even getting out of there afterward when they shut off the lights and locked the gates.

These things are all part of the process and that stuff adds up. Your four hours becomes more really fast in a lot of cases, and that's not even counting the sights unseen that go along with covering prep events. To add to my libraries and offices, I once went to a freaking player's house to file because his dad rocked when the prep work didn't pan out. How much extra time does something like that take?

I brought it up earlier in this thread, I used to string for a mid-sized paper that paid $50 a story regardless of what it was. Six-inch advance that took 20 minutes, five-hour high school doubleheader baseball game, the same rate. As a regular stringer I could make that work by doing enough of the short stuff to counter the long and really come out way ahead on an hourly rate. Not everyone can do that. And it still paid more with less obligations than this question!

Argue forever that you can do a high school football game in four hours or less. Point really is the pay is ridiculous and we shouldn't have to cut a bazillion corners to shave 15 minutes off the total time to sort of make it worth it.

 

From the Dept. of Best Laid Plans:
When Don MacLean was a high school basketball star at Simi Valley High, he was going to make his college announcement in the gym during lunch. We were a PM paper, so I could get his news into print same day. I arrived at Simi early and scouted out the terrain -- I found where the pay phone was and how to get to it from the gym.

Lunch bell, kids started coming into the gym, MacLean made his announcement, I grabbed a quick quote and ran outside to the pay phone. Dammit. There were at least 10 girls waiting in line to use the phone. I told the first one in line that I had to make a very brief phone call and if she let me cut in, I would pay for all of their phone calls. She did. I handed her a bunch of quarters and went back to the gym for more comments.

 

I’m just old enough that when I started stringing in the early 1990s, I had to dictate.

I remember scoping out pay phones at gas stations and restaurants near the high school so I wouldn’t have to wait in line and then hog the phone for 10-15 minutes. I dictated box scores to some poor bastard in the sports department!

 

We're talking the freelancer perspective here, though.

I adapted because as a full-time employee it didn't matter how long I was at the stadium. I got paid for every second I was on site. I had a company phone to send out social media updates and I had company camera gear to take photos. The only skin in the game I had was my car and my time. At $20/hour, I'm making $100 on a Friday night if I'm on site at 6 for a 7:30 kickoff and hitting an 11 p.m. deadline. A freelancer is making half of that.

You want to have me Tweet, take photos, file an immediate gamer at the buzzer, fine. Asking the same of freelancers for less than half of what you pay your staffers is criminal, and a surefire way to lose freelancers.

 

I was thinking about those days last November when I had an assignment for Section water polo finals out of town on a Saturday. One game was early enough where we could get it in Sunday's paper. I had a couple of hours to get it done before the deadline and a couple of hours until the second game after that. My first thought: s"If I can't write a water polo game in a couple of hours, I've failed as a journalist. The second, when I got there, since the location was out of town, was "Where's the nearest Starbucks?"

 

I dictated as late as 2003 or 2004. Iowa state baseball tournament. Computer didn't connect or something. I actually don't totally recall the circumstances. Used a pay phone too!

 

So just me (I made a pretty legit living as a stringer for almost two years before I eventually got a full-time job doing something completely different at the same paper), I used libraries and school offices while covering football games, went to a player's house to file a story (did not know this family beforehand), dictated as late as the early 2000s from a major prep event, definitely got locked in a stadium after a game at least once, and also definitely used a truck stop to send a story. At least once! Man, certainly forgetting something. Or a lot of somethings.

I know prep coverage has dwindled and with things like 5G and wifi a lot of this cannot be the same as it once was, but is it? Man, and to think of all those occupational hazards for $40 with all those tasks.

 

One time around 2007 or so, we had a stringer covering a Friday football game involving one of our local teams on the road in Hiawassee, Georgia -- up in the mountains -- before the days of prevalent WiFi.

Stringer couldn't get any connection otherwise, so he managed to get into the home team's coaches' offices to dictate his story on deadline, while the coaches were doing whatever they were doing after the game.

Our assistant SE at the time, who had to take the dictation while he was still working on his own story, lamented to the stringer over the phone: "Fucking one horse fucking town!"

After a few seconds pause, he then added: "Wait, you're not on speaker phone, are you?"

We got a great laugh out of that one.

 

Graduated from an Iowa high school in 1987. We played our JV games on Monday nights.

 

I balanced a 12-pound Portabubble on my knee while holding the couplers. In a phone booth, 70 miles from home. In a strip mall across from the stadium in Mount Carmel, Pa. After a game ended in the third quarter by snowstorms.