Tips for reporting on high school athletics

The only thing I would add that hasn't already been mentioned is when you cover a high school football, basketball or hockey game, make damn sure you pee before the kickoff-tipoff-faceoff.

There is nothing more agonizing that to get halfway through the second quarter of a football or basketball game and have an overflowing bladder, because you can't go before halftime without completely screwing up your stats and play-by-play.

 

How has that been overlooked in this thread?

 

One other - know where the hell you're going. Don't just get an address and plug it into your GPS or Google Maps.

You'll end up at the high school when the football field or baseball field is at a nearby park. Or maybe the basketball court is under renovation and they're playing at the middle school, which is clear across town.

 

**And in these cases in which you're not sure where you're going, leave 30 minutes to an hour earlier than you normally would. This advice has saved me on at least two occasions in just the past month.

 

Yeah, I always try to get there an hour or 45 minutes before game time, to get set up in the press box, make sure there's no last-minute number changes and all that. And as EagleMorph said, if it's somewhere you've never been, call the coach to make sure the football field is on campus.

 

One of my favorite interviews I ever did was shagging flies and taking BP with a local pro baseball player. It was during the summer. He was working out with two other minor leaguers and said I could do BP with him and talk after. So I pitched, shagged balls and got to bat, too.

We talked after. That was cool.

I would feel uncomfortable getting on the field during a high school practice, though.

 

I actually got a pretty cool column out of throwing batting practice for a local prep team once. They got to the regional finals and were lined up to play a team with two lefties who were set to pitch in college when their high school days were done, and I was visiting practice to do a feature story on one of the guys. Coach sees me taking notes and asks if I'm left-handed. I tell him I am and he asks if I'll throw BP because the only lefty they've got needs to pitch the first game of the series. So I spend about an hour throwing BP to the whole team so they can get practice off a southpaw and it turns into a column that people really seemed to like.

All in all, the readers were happy, I had some fun and the local Walgreens sold eight tubes of Ben-Gay as I tried to get the feeling back into my arm the next day.

 

A couple of quick things:

1. I like Batman's point. Being seen is huge on any beat. I cover a college beat primarily and try to get to as many practices as possible, at least during football season. The trainers love to talk. So do the managers and the videographers. It's all background stuff, but every once in a while, you get a nugget that you store in the back of your mind to ask the head coach down the road. When the players get used to seeing your face out there, they get a lot more comfortable with you. Nothing wrong with shooting a few hoops after basketball practice when you're waiting for a player to come out of the training room, or even just rebounding with one of the guys who is staying late to get extra shots. I've had a lot of "shoot the shit" moments come about that way.

2. The sidelines vs. press box argument is one of the oldest here. In good weather, I prefer the sidelines because teams keep making jerseys where the numbers are impossible to read. In bad weather, I have no choice but to stay up top because I've yet to find waterproof stat sheets. If you do choose the sidelines, a great guy to attach yourself to is the team's stat keeper. It gives you a second set of eyes to bounce numbers/yardages off of.

3. I seventh the notion of looking ahead of time for a place to file. Most high schools have a wireless network any more, and if you call ahead and ask for a username/password, they'll probably give you one so you can file. If that fails, McDonald's is an option. Another is to find a nearby hotel, stop in before the game and ask if you can file from their lobby. Just explain who you are, and 95 percent of the time, the front desk worker will be sympathetic.

 

Or you can dictate your story back to the desk from the pay phone in front of the nearest Hardee's or 7-11, which I did multiple times back in the olden days of the late 1990s, before everyone over the age of 9 had a cell phone. I recommend Hardee's, whose burgers beat 7-11's nasty dried out hot dogs for a postgame meal every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Seriously, all great advice here, and I'm likely to take the suggestion of compiling these things into a list of bullet points to pass along to the steady churn of college kids who I bring on to freelance at my place. I remember covering my first prep games ... nobody told me anything. It would have been great to have a resource like this back then. You do learn a lot by falling into some of these traps and screwing things up, but that'll also raise your editor's blood pressure to dangerous levels. For all the folks new to the biz, read what's here and do it -- even if it seems like a bunch of unnecessary legwork. You won't be sorry.

 

I can tell you in Texas the best thing about covering high school football is hitting Whataburger at midnight or 1 a.m. and getting a couple of sausage, egg and cheese taquitos. Extra salsa please.

 

Keep your own stats...use the school statisticians to double check things, but never as the only source. Find a system that works best for you, because you're probably going to be juggling a bunch of things along with the actual reporting.

Don't hesitate to talk with the prep athletes...most can be a good interview, but not all.

Also, I try to limit interviews to one or two when talking with athletes after a game...no sense talking to five kids after a game and getting them excited about being in the paper only to be letdown the next morning when the QB is the only one quoted in the story.

 

I was thinking about that earlier. Been there, done that. More than once.