Track parent

In our area we do have someone who compiles Sectional leaders and also sends out results of the divisional meets that lead up to the state meet. We got the results of the last meet while the one coach who contacts us regularly was still on the bus, so I called and we were able to go over them as he rode home.

One of my pet peeves are track coaches who have no concept of the minute hand: "Oh, and Johnny Jerkoff had a personal best of 65.7 seconds in the 400."

 

One of my pet peeves are track coaches who round up to the tenth of a second in an event where most races are won by less than that and the official results go down the thousandth of a second.

 

Um, slightly off topic, but tullyrunners.com does a greatjob with all of New York.

Taters, explain to the parent that you are working with the coach to get the result in the paper but, honestly, track results can be complicated and you're still getting the kinks worked out with the coach. The parent can also have a talk with the coach -- she doesn't always have to be breathing down your neck. Obviously you've bent over backwards to get this team in the paper.

 

Tell me WHY. You hate faxes. WHY?

 

Just clarifying my stance. If you trade emails with someone twice, and they are still bitching and it is getting nowhere, you stop emailing them.

You are not changing you stance, and she is not changing hers. Refer her to the correct people and move on.

 

I've found that coaches give me their stuff in whatever format they get it. If the meet has electronic files, they'll pass those on. If the meet just gives them printouts, I'm getting the fax. Doesn't bother me either way.

 

I would think because then you have to type in every single result.

If it's e-mailed, all you have to do is cut and paste it, then format it to your paper's style. Much quicker and easier.

 

That depends on the information you get.

If they send a fax, I just sort out what I need and then put the sheets into my file. When I write up a meet one of my local teams has been in, I only put in the events in which those athletes placed. No need to put in the 4x100 relay results when no one from my area is running in it.

I have a coach who faxes me over the same sheets he gets at the end of the meet. Team scores, preliminary results, finals results. Anyone who competed in that meet that day is on the sheet. I take what I need from it and then file it.

I have another coach who e-mails. He sends only what his people did. He only lists the time or distance if his athlete(s) won. He says where his team finishes but doesn't list all the team scores (I get suspicious when they place high in a meet and assume all the other teams were crappy, too).

If my choices are working with a fax with all the info or working with an e-mail with incomplete info because coach can't/won't give me the right stuff, then I'll take the fax.

Of course, I've been doing it this way since 1996. Our paper was so behind the times that we didn't have individual e-mail accounts until 2003. I know of one newspaper around here that still has ONE e-mail address that EVERYBODY has to use. And the computer that receives the e-mail is in advertising. AND it's dial-up. I've tried to send stories from there on a Friday night. It's running OS IX. With Netscape. Yeah.

So perhaps our circumstances have dictated our beliefs.

 

First off, as the poster below says, it's just a lot easier to get information from email in terms of copy and pasting it from one document to the other.

Second, I don't have to type up a single thing. I may have to edit something, look up official spellings of names and/or omit certain information that is indeed useless (I.E. Little Johnny Nobody placed 33rd in the 3,000 with a time of six hours, 13 minutes) but I'm going to have to do that same thing on a fax.

The biggest thing, though, is that emails are never ridden with shitty handwriting. I find that nine out of 10 of the faxes I get on a daily basis are full of chicken scratch and instead of just copying and pasting the information from one place to another, I've got to sit there and analyze someone's words and figure out if they meant "John Smith finished first in the 55-meter dash" or "Ron Pitts finished fourth in the 55-meter hurdles".

Oh, and how hard is it to email something? Seriously.

 

I've hung up on one parent in 12 years, a cheerleader/track mom who was bitching without taking a breath and with her daughter chiming in from the background.

A couple years later I was on a bus trip and this mom was just nice as pie. Her voice sounded familiar, and it was the track mom. Never had a problem with her after that. I don't think she was used to people hanging up on her.

Now, when a parent wants to bitch about coverage on a Monday, I wait until Wednesday. If they're still mad, then it's something to deal with. Usually I leave a message and that's the end of it.

 

I'm glad we have a website -- KYTrackXC.com -- that updates pretty regularly. They get stuff submitted from coaches off the e-mail list serve, and the site is an easy-to-use format. It's pretty sweet.

 

I had an episode last weekend, trying to bang out agate from the county meet as the office is literally being disassembled around me. The carpet was being ripped out and replaced in half of the open office opposite the news half, an effort that involved loud power tools, carpet glue dust and some sort of grinding apparatus that one of the workers said "trips a circuit breaker nine times out of 10."

And I left out the boys' 1,600-meter relay, which was won by the local school's relay team, whose third runner was the son of my absolute worst parent.

Most of her claim to fame has to do with her sons' average careers on the local ski teams (HS and club), but her difficult-ness is so celebrated that she is the first parent of my career to earn the "send mail from her directly into Junk Mail" filter she attempted to rent my staff to provide advertising copy for a two-page ad on her son's club team. Multiple coaches I have spoken to have brought up unsolicited horror stories (and her raging alcoholism).

And of course, it had to be her kid's school in her kid's sport in her kid's relay (that had something to do with the final outcome of the meet).

My point is thus: Some days, fate conspires to rip you a new one. Instead of desperately attempting to make everyone happy, it's sometimes best to recognize the absurdity of it all and just move on.