Friday night high school football coverage

Two staffed by the two full-timers, one staffed by a part-timer, one staffed by the sister paper 45 miles away, the rest are calls.

We have 25 schools with a football program.

 

Our staff couldn't disagree more. We're sick of keeping up with Dixie League Baseball. Of course, high school football is our biggest thing of the year. Our paper has a policy that doesn't allow sports guys to take vacation from mid-August to about the third week in December when the state title games are wrapping up.

We have three full-time beat writers who cover their respective schools each Friday night, then about four or five stringers who cover the same schools each week. We have almost 50 high schools in the area, ranging in enrollment from about 25 to about 2,500. We rely more on coaches to call in the ones we can't attend instead of parents. We've found the coaches in our area are far more trustworthy than parents.

If a beat guy's team has an open date, we usually pick the best area game that week, then maybe hit up a college game the next day. High schools games that are televised on Thursdays or Saturdays throw a kink in the operation, though.

 

We have three full-timers and one, sometimes two part-timers for five high schools.

Unless it's a real faraway game with one of our teams that suck, we're there.

 

What?!
You have 50, (5-0!) high schools in your coverage area and only three full-time beat writers?
If you had 50 high schools in your coverage area your paper's circulation would be LARGE. Metro-size at least, right?
Is high school coverage not a big deal in your area? Though it must be if some of the game are televised.
How can you have that many high schools, that small of a staff and cover only about 1/3 of your circulation market?*

* That's assuming you have eight writers who all covering games in which the two teams playing are both within the coverage area.

Wow. I can't comprehend having that small of a staff for that large of an area.
(Edit) How big is your prep preivew tab?

We have a six-man staff, plus two-to-three stringers to cover 27 high schools. We have a core group of six high schools whose home games are covered every week, three of those schools we follow everywhere. The rest are divided up.
We also have a sister paper that has a three-man staff with two stringers - giving us anywhere from 11 to 15 gamers for our Saturday edition. The fringe games: We rely on coaches to call.

 

why's that?

 

Apologies. Should've made my post clearer. How about content? What else do you put on your pages besides gamers? We do a combined notebook and box scores.

 

We do gamers and boxes. Features and previews for later in the week.

 

We seem to only actually cover one game for about 20 area high schools and do capsules for the rest. But that coverage is going to expand (at least somewhat) we are going to start something that Gannett calls Preps Factory. I'm setting it up and so far it looks a like a good system that some other papers have. You can access stats, schedules, rosters and a slew of other information. Hopefully this takes off so we can add more to it. I think if we were to cover high school sports more, more people would actually follow it. This area doesn't seem to embrace sports very well even though the locals like to call this a sports town.

 

The Huntington (W.Va.) Herald-Dispatch, formerly a Gannett paper, had that on its website. Very nice.

 

High school coverage is our No. 1 priority, especially high school football. Our preview tab last year was around 25-30 pages. We wrote a preview for 43 different high schools last year, and this year that's been upped to 47, I think.

A few of those schools, however, are schools out of our area that are in the same district as some of our main schools, particularly the larger classifications. We try to keep up with them as much as possible for the sake of the fans of the teams in our area. When I count up the number of high school teams that are in cities/towns/communities that we actually sell the newspaper, it's 37. So, I'm sorry if I misrepresented the numbers. We write previews and keep up with almost 50, but it's almost 40 in our actual circulation area.

Our circulation is 30,000 daily and about 38,000-39,000 on Sunday. One helpful thing, as you pointed out, is that many of our schools are in the same districts (nine total districts across all classifications). So once district games start, we're double-dipping with each game.

 

Are you kidding me?

Your tab, was only 30 pages for 40 to 50 schools? And high school football was the No. 1 priority. Maybe to you, but not the ad department.
Our Pigskin Preview (27 high schools, plus five colleges) tab hasn't been less than 148 pages in the last four years.
We work at roughly the same size papers.

 

I once worked at a paper in West Texas that technically covered about 50 schools. (I say technically, because some towns that actually got our paper were like seven hours away. We wouldn't go there to cover a game, but we would throw them some space in our weekly notebooks if warranted).

The circulation area was roughly the size of the state of Ohio. At the time, it was a 30,000+ circulation (it has since scaled back).

West Texas is fucking desolate.