Running Football Tab Thread

I didn't do my newspapers tab this year, instead I left to put together a 220-page magazine on Florida Football. After doing that projects, a football tab is an easy as a softball gamer.

Magazine cover is at http://floridafb.com

 

Bullshit. I've seen tabs with over 80 teams and they got rosters. It's a pain in the ass and there are always a few coaches who refuse to cooperate, but it's something readers want to see, especially if they've had it in the past.

Team photos, on the other hand, suck. They are ugly. They waste space. And imagine if you mix up the photos! I know that happened once at a suburban paper in the Northeast that has since gone out of business. This screw-up was one example of why.

They ran one team picture twice, once where it belonged and another timeon the wrong team's page. One of their preps reporters saw the early print run and looks at a page with a team that he knew is mostly black and he sees a sea of white faces staring back at him.

If I remember correctly, none of these tabs actually made it to the streets, but they had to destroy something like 10,000 of them. Might have been more than that.

Amazingly enough, nobody got fired for all that.

 

They're not running those rosters to point out the star running back. That is, or should, already be in the story.

They're running those rosters so the 4-11, 87-pound freshman linebacker gets his name in the paper, so Mom and Dad and the extended family are happy. Same reasoning why people run long-ass youth swimming stories.

 

If you absolutely must run team photos (and I don't think you do, but there are some weird communities out there) ... have the schools arrange the photos and send them to you (in arranging the photographer to shoot the "official" team photos that EVERYONE takes, they almost always have a copyright release in them for school use). It takes a while -- a year or two -- for them to catch on sometimes (I still have coaches and ADs who want me to shoot college signings when we haven't done that for 7 years), but a little in-print embarrassment will change that pretty quickly.

 

It's called giving the readers what they want. And sometimes that means doing something we think is a ridiculous waste of space.

 

But the thing is, you're providing that something for a handful of readers. Just a small percentage of your readership.

My contention is that you can do things with that space which will be more useful to more readers ... additional analysis of the team, historical data, statistical data.

 

Besides, if football teams are anything like they are in my neck of the woods, roster turnover doesn't begin to describe it. I remember I had a beginning-of-fall roster and the coach spent ten minutes with a grease pencil crossing names off it. Here's how the conversation went:

"What happened to him?"
"A turd. A total turd. Kicked him to the curb."
"How about him?"
"Ditto."
"And...."
"The same."
Then he pauses and he says, "It's kind of like flushing the toilet. We're good to go now."

 

Like one of my previous stops. We ran every goddamned roster of 90-plus teams. Plus an ad with a team photo. Tracking down the rosters was the worst because we would get them with no numbers, with names spelled differently than the previous years, with no heights and weights ("At [school name], we don't worry about the size of the kids, just the size of their hearts."). We always got what we needed, though.

My favorite excuse for not getting us a roster was "I really don't know who's going to be on varsity." Bullshit. In small towns in Texas, your varsity roster is set when your kids are in the sixth grade, barring dropping out of school.

 

Well, yes and no. Small schools here in TX have crazy coach turnover - at least in our area - and many times we've got as many as a dozen schools with a new coach with absolutely no clue who he's got on the team. And even if he does, at many small schools these kids will be moved from safety to quarterback or defensive end to running back sometimes. They're just good athletes, and there isn't anyone else to fill that hole. Coaches have no clue on that until kids show up for tryouts/practice.

Getting the basic stats from many coaches - returning starters, new players, etc., can be hard enough as it is. (Out of 75 or so schools we're still missing around two dozen questionnaires, despite contacting these guys multiple times, and we start printing mid-August)

Oh and, yeah, we've gotta run the ugly team photo - ads are centered on them.

 

Shameless bump...I'm sure the thread is a little more timely now.

How's things going? I'm wrapping up photos this week.

 

Football Tab = end of summer fun