The lost art of the 'gamer'

With football season starting in many areas tomorrow night, it's time for another thread on prep sports gamers.

They're becoming an endangered species, it seems. With earlier deadlines, an emphasis on social media to provide game details/quotes, and a lack of reporters to attend games, you'll see fewer and fewer gamers in Saturday sports sections.

Call me old-fashioned, but that's a shame. I got my start writing them as a stringer, and always found it a challenge to come up with a unique lede while writing under a tight deadline. (My go-to technique in the pre-Internet days was to think of the first couple graphs in my car as I drove to find a pay phone).

I still enjoy reading them and occasionally writing them, even if it's for teams I don't know. As a fan of prep games and of small-town journalism, high school gamers contain information you can't get anywhere else, and I hope they still have a place.

The above quote is a (slightly altered) version of one of my favorite basketball ledes, written by an old pro who gave me invaluable advice when I first started covering games.

For those of you heading out to football fields (or other sporting events) this weekend, bring some bug spray, enjoy the hot dog and pray for a clock that keeps moving.

 

I might miss reading them, but I sure as hell don't miss writing them. Last shop I was at, I would be writing gamers remotely from a Wendy's bc I wouldn't have time to go back to the news room and do it from my desktop. Not only writing the gamer, but including the stats and drive summaries -- and all in under 30 minutes from the last whistle. OK, fine, the thrill of pulling that off is pretty unbeatable, but damn if it didn't age me.

 

It's true, high school football has all sorts of potential delays that make filing by deadline a high-blood-pressure scramble. Homecoming festivities, pre-game introductions, halftime band performances that run long ... not to mention the increasing use of the spread-type offenses (with subpar QBs and receivers trying to run them).

And forget about it if you're in a state/region that plays JV games before the varsity on Friday night.

 

Oh yes. And where I worked last, they had a "hard" start time for varsity. Rightly so, I may add, since only relatives of the players show up for the JV game.

 

I was fortunate that I worked at places that had late deadlines.

It's amazing how much they've been cut back in the last 10 years. I doubt I'd wanna deal with it anymore.

 

Seems as if weather delays are more frequent than they used to be, too. Same can be said for college football.

Had several games last year disrupted by bench-clearing brawls, which make the reporter's task on deadline that much more difficult.

On the positive side, a reporter friend who's been covering high school football for 35 years says he's gotten to the point where he enjoys blowouts, because the running-clock rule in one-sided games in his state is his best friend on deadline.

 

The private school association in our state has that. I covered one early-season football game where it was in full effect. Kickoff was at 7 p.m., and I was heading back to the office by sundown.

The basketball running clock is terrific, too. One year, we had a school with a god-awful girls team and a state championship boys team, so we often got the running clock in both games. It was like Nirvana. Tip off for the girls was usually at 6, and I remember one night walking out of the gym at 7:30 after a varsity doubleheader.

 

I loved Mass. when they did the 16-minute halves. Now that they do the 8-minute quarters, it's more of a pain.

 

I would start "writing" on my walk to the car after my postgame interviews.

 

My game last Friday was a blowout that started 50 minutes late because of lightning. We have a much earlier deadline now so I was writing on my iPad the entire game. Story was done as soon as the game was over. Emailed it to the desk, went down and got some quick interviews and added them to the story. Somehow made deadline. It was stressful.

 

Where I was stringing last fall, we had to file a bare-bones story soon as the final gun went off to meet print edition deadline (thank God no one runs the spread out here), then do a writethru with quotes (just like AP) for the web.

 

If you have a day's delay, (and the space) make it work for you. Give it a feature-y feel. Find out if the "player of the game" had anything interesting happen to him earlier in the week - root canal, Chemistry test, got his driver's license, etc. Maybe he had a special guest (a grandma, cousin) attending the game or had some special meal "Normally I just go with a cheeseburger, but i went with a chicken sandwich this week."
Yes - it's stupid, but SI has people spend days following players and coaches leading up to the Super Bowl ready to incorporate such stuff into their Super Bowl gamer depending on who wins.