Track parent

You are doing your job. You cannot do it if the coach does not cooperate.

Give the parent the names and emails of the AD, principal and school board members.

Then ignore her.

 

Fixed.
For what it's worth, I'm fine with throwing fishing in with that last.

 

wow, and i thought you were rough on me

 

In almost every school district, the varsity coach is required to send results, when it is the home team, to the various media outlets.

It's the coach's fault, not yours. You've done what you could do. The best thing I found in these situations is to tell the parents that. When they realize the coach is not doing his or her work, that usually ends the call right there.

 

Before we totally throw the coach under the bus here, when asked, she did fax results. Unfortunately, they arrived at times when if something was amiss (a lack of first names, half the fax being smudged, etc), by the time the situation was resolved, it was after deadline.
The parent also insists that there should be quotes in the stories, similar to the ones on other sports.

 

S-P, you're problem is with the coach, or with you not making it clear to the coach that you need COMPLETE results, first names, times, etc., by a specific deadline or they will not get in the paper.
Then, you let the parent know exactly what the situation is: the results arrived at times when if something was amiss (a lack of first names, half the fax being smudged, etc), by the time the situation was resolved, it was after deadline.
And obviously if you can't reach the coach in time to resolve these issues before deadline, you aren't getting any quotes from the coach because she was not available to talk to.
Yes, the parent is a pain in the ass. But do not ignore her as Devil suggested and do not get testy with her. Explain the situation.

 

To echo what someone else said, you need to tell this coach that she can't be sending you results on deadline day and expect to get them in the paper. Have a conversation with her and tell her the drop-dead date/time. If she connected with you the night before your deadline, you could get quotes too.

But to say the least, you're not alone when it comes to uncooperative coaches. In my area each sport has a director (one of the coaches) whose job it is to collect the scores and compile the standings. Our softball director is good to deal with, but she's got 20-some coaches who don't get that it's their responsibility to communicate with her. And as you might imagine, if they won't communicate with one of their own, there's no chance in hell they'll work with us. We've tried. Repeatedly. So we never have accurate standings.

Last night we had a baseball coach who didn't return three messages left on his phone and an email seeking the result of his playoff game. He didn't even report it to the state Web site yesterday (as he's supposed to) -- it was past 10 a.m. today before it appeared there.

Nobody is going to budge coaches who don't care ... a few weeks ago I had an angry baseball mom on the phone from a school that hadn't communicated with us all season -- this woman was breathing fire about how her son's team had no coverage. I told her to talk to the coach and tell him to return his phone calls. I can only assume from the passionate way she bitched at me that she must have done that. Still never got any response from this coach. Either the mom didn't really care enough to confront the coach, or the coach didn't care.

You can't make them care, but you can set your policies and leave it for them to follow or not follow.

 

I did not realize that Track still existed at HS level.

 

Awesome!

FYI, our HS editor suggests strongly that coaches email in anything lengthy, like swimming, golf, track results. Nobody -- including coaches -- wants to be on the phone that long to read through pages of results. They also don't have to wait on hold.

S-P, ditch the fax. Tell them it's broken, anything, and unplug the sumbitch. It's the 21st century.

 

Especially since some track stat software can just output AP style agate.

 

Fixed.