Quick parent rant

Last football season, I covered a D-2 school. A local kid --a runningback -- played on the home team and ran for 236 yards one week. The next week, the visiting team had a local kid on it -- the long snapper. In a 55-3 rout of the home team, I failed to mention the long snapper, who entered the game on two punts. I got an e-mail that said something like, "I see how it is. Smith and Jones get all the coverage because they're on the 'home team.' My son is on the a team that won three straight division championships. Where is his coverage? GO VISITORS!!!"

Keep in mind, his son did shit. I'm not from the town and did not go to said school. And I could give a shit who gets covered or why.


Some parents are great; I've got good stories, too. However, most of them need to grow up and quit living through their kids.

 

my last big-time run-in with a parent was a swim team mom.
she ambushed me in the front office after we ran the list of district championship winners of the local team.
She: You didn't print all the names of the winners.
Me: Yes I did, all of the first-place winners were in there.
She: They weren't the only winners. Some finished second or third.
Me: Second and third place is not the winner.
She: Girls (she had here two small girls with her), this man just called you losers.
Me: Ma'am, I did not.
She: Come on girls, he says you are losers.
She walked away before I told her girls that their mom was a bitch and I got fired.
Gotta love those swim moms.

 

What is it with swim parents? Why are they so psycho?

We've got two competing swim clubs in a small town. One mom got mad at the way some girls were treating her daughter, so she offered to pay the coach almost twice as much out of her own pocket if he would start a new club. Now there's two swim clubs, they practice at the same pool at the same time, side-by-side lanes, and completely ignore each other. And they try to use the paper to fire barbs back and forth.

 

You also have swim coaches who will not give you the times to publish in the paper out of fear that opponents will read the times in the paper and stack their lineups accordingly.

 

And really, that's all you needed to say. Because that one word explains everything.

 

My favorite parent complaint is that we favor Team A over Team B and that it seems like Team A is the only one that ever gets covered.

I keep a list of how many times we've covered each team. So, last basketball season, I got an e-mail from a guy - it was so long I think he found a publisher for it - about this particular issue. He was so upset that we never covered Team B. We have four major high schools in town, and I wrote back and said, "Sir, I respect your passion for your team. However, we have covered your team more than any of the other three teams in the city. In fact, here's a breakdown of how many times we've covered each team: Team B 8, Team A 7, Team C 6, Team D 7."

I never got a reply.

That was one example, but that happens all the time. So, if your paper truly is spreading the wealth, keep track of the number of times you cover everybody and fire back at them. Nothing better than facts.

 

Yes we do.

 

Remember, "it's for the kids" means "it's for MY kids"

 

All I can add is get used to it if you're going to be in this business. It doesn't end. At least people are reading.

 

We'll have 3 swim clubs go to the same meet. For a while, they would only turn in their own club's times. Finally we said send us the complete meet results and we'll excerpt what we want, or nothing gets in.

On our preseason info forms, we'll sometimes ask what changes coaches would like to make in HS sports.

My favorite response from a rather hard-headed coach: "Ban the f-ing parents."

 

Damnedest thing, swimming people want it covered like a big-time sport, then they don't want you to publish the same kind of information that's essential in every other sport.

 

It's been my experience that the same parents who break out the "they work as hard as everybody else" line about their sixth-grade football team are the same ones who feel like we're "picking on them" when we cover one of their 42-0 losses.
The "How come you only cover us when we lose" bit is another classic, ain't it? Like we know when it's going to happen.