SID: "We're not claiming to be journalists."

About 10 years ago I inquired about an assistant SID opening at a CAA school. It was 24K with no benefits. Being newly married and looking to start a family, I took a pass.

 

When I started as a post-graduate SID intern (working full-time and then some) at an SEC school in 2003, a pretty standard entry-level SID position, my salary was a whopping -- wait for it -- $14,400 per year. Good state benefits, though. I think the assistant media relations guy above me made between $24-29,000.

To get back into sports I actually took about a $10,000 pay cut from what I had made the previous year working less than full-time while I was finishing up school. Ahh, the good ol' days.

 

If I had a dollar for every time SIDs wrote that someone "would" do this or "would" do that, I could retire.

 

GW doesn't have football, though. That makes their men's hoops SID the top guy and changes the pecking order below him. What's the next biggest sport there - women's hoops? Soccer? Could be baseball, although the team seems terrible.

 

Or written by people overseas.

... On another note, it's probably time to do an update on how the new BBCOR-standard bats are performing at the collegiate level. Congrats to the kid for his perfecto just the same.

 

One of my SID mentors, who has been in the business for better than 30 years, gave me a pretty substantial lecture in college (in the days before I was allowed to write gamers) about why "would" doesn't belong. She eventually chalked it up to the SportsCenter-raised generation of SIDs who hear it all the time on TV.

I still have to comb through our game stories to take some of these lines out: "The Slapdicks would get on the board for the first time in the top of the first, when Joe Bloe would hit a sacrifice fly to center field, which would score Jack Mehoff to make it a 1-0 game."

 

A craptastic load of announcerspeak finds its way into print.

 

I've mentioned this regularly on various threads. I tell our writers to be aware of what announcers say, but don't be influenced by them.

 

I guess it does have something to do with broadcasting. One of my best friends is the play by play guy for the college I cover. He always does the "would" thing. I've explained to him why it's wretched, but it hasn't done any good.

 

If it's a feature on the player, the SID should write it word-for-word like you would if you were writing for the local paper. It's just all positive.

A newspaper should never bitch about a free gamer, and they should have their head examined if they are running an SID college gamer without editing it.

Shit, all of us can get a six inches out of a faxed box (yes, I did type that) in about five minutes flat.

 

The only time most people get six inches out of a box is with the old movie popcorn trick.
Sorry. Couldn't resist. Should have, but didn't.

 

Here's my latest story on being the in-house writer .... I'm at softball because the team is playing North Carolina on opening day ... Team loses 5-0 and then loses the nightcap 5-0 to another team whose pitcher had a great game. Interviewed the coach afterward, she goes "You just sat through 14 innings without us scoring a run, you're entitled to write whatever you want...." Two hours later, the kid doing baseball is panicking because he doesn't know how to spin the team losing a game to a bad team; My response: "Every minute you waste trying to overanalyze and overwrite is a minute you could be at the bar. He hasn't asked for advice since.