Going easy on preps?

Contrarian shot on the scene.

1. Jargon is not a black-and-white, never-use-it type of issue. Jargon is often easily recognized ways of saying something. And wincing every time jargon is used is a case of over-thinking the issue.

2. Same thing with upsets. There ARE upsets in high school sports. Plain and simple. You DO usually have an idea of who's better than whom.

If you don't EVER want to use jargon, or you don't EVER want to refer to a high school result as an upset, that's your call. To me, it's taking some of the tools out of your toolbox. Of course, as that asshole Tony Sinclair says, "Always in mod-er-a-tion."

 

I've been writing negatively lately and I'm always afraid I'm going to regret it.

Last week I pointed out a kid that fumbled the ball, and later I wished I just attributed it to the team. It wasn't game-changing, it was just one mistakes in a series of mistakes.

Today, I used a little more anaylsis -- like the secondary was soft, inexperience played a role -- stuff like that.

Sometimes when we're forced to cover bad teams, we have to write the truth.

 

An interesting topic.

My SE has always told me to write positive leads with HS kids, i.e. "The Braves rolled 35-0" instead of "The Broncos got crushed 35-0," but that's probably fairly standard. If I'm dealing with a real whipping, I like to use non-violent verbs that still indicate the nature of the contest, like "rolled," "cruised," "dispatched" etc. About the worst I'll go is "routed," which used to mean something a lot different back in the olden times, but so did conventional terms like "sacked," too.

 

speaking of all this prep stuff ... if we're putting on kid gloves for everything, what do you do when you know about some stuff (drinking beer, smoking dope) on a kids myspace page?

 

Until it becomes a legal matter, is it a story anyway? And who's to say everything on a Myspace page is the truth?

 

Well put. It is silly to say there are no upsets at the high school level just because there is no betting. I can see avoiding writing that a team was favored, because then there is a question of who were they favored by. But if a winless team beats and undefeated, top-ranked opponent, it is an upset.

 

I had an issue of word choice this week when covering a game. One player missed two extra points and a game-winning field goal at the end of regulation, then his team lost at the end of overtime.

I put it down that he missed the extra points, indirectly leading to the loss, but because he was the team's tailback, I made sure to include that he also ran for 80 yards and two touchdowns. It was, in my opinion, a fair trade-off - after all, I wasn't nailing the kid, and I gave equal weight to his misses as I did his accomplishments.

 

Well, I'd be willing to bet it's not photoshopped. Also, isn't this basically what happened to Matt Stafford when he was caught with drinking at the Talladega Superspeedway infield?

I'm just saying a 15-year-old kid boozin it up ain't a good thing. But it sure as hell ain't my job to be his father.

So you're saying I go up to the coach, "Hey, you seen your star LBs myspace page?" and then wait to write the story ... Star linebacker missed biggest rivalry game of the season due to an undisclosed injury. Panty waste coach cited HIPA.

 

I know what you're going for, but we have to write the truth anyway. Sure, Johnny Fumblefail's parents might well appreciate that you hid his six-pack of turnovers in vague terms or glossed over them entirely, but the people who weren't at the game will wonder if you knew anything at all about who had the ball, and the people who were at the game will say with a knowing chuckle, "we know what really happened." So will you, but do you want to give people reason to think you don't?

 

I'm not saying you tell on the kid and wait for an action so you can write. But I don't think a kid drinking or smoking is a story until something does happen. If you see a picture on his or her Myspace page and he wasn't disciplined, by anyone, is that a story? Now, if you see the pictures, then the coach says he's out for "disciplinary reasons," but won't reveal anything else, you might have something. But with HIPA, all you can do is talk to the player because you just don't know the "real" reason, and by law, no coach can tell you. Myspace information, in my opinion, is all speculation unless you can get a solid source or two.

 

I guess I left the [/sarcasm] off when I was refering to HIPA. One coach cited it once, stringer wrote it in the paper and now it's a running joke/crutch that coaches tell us when they don't want to tell us that they suspended a kid.

 

A lot of times teams are favored by papers in terms of polls/rankings. Some states have AP/coaches associations for statewide rankings and a lot of papers that cover double-digit high schools have their local top 10 or 20. If an unranked team is going against your paper's No. 1 team, I'd say No. 1 is favored. Just like when No. 1 is favored when they play No. 9 in a local poll.