Way off track

Which high school sport do you find the most difficult to cover -- especially if you have to get results on the phone -- because of lack of organization?

I saw track and nothing is a close second. ("Uhhh... we didn't get his time. Uhhh... they hadn't figured up the totals when the bus left. Uhhh... there's supposed to be this Web site that has the results. Uhhh...")

 

Nothing worse in the call-taking world than track stats. Too many events. Too many names. And then just when you think you're done, the voice on the other line says, "And now for the girls' results ...."

 

No debate from me. Haven't taken a track score yet this year, but you always know it's coming. Season starts next week. :'(

 

Swimming scores ain't fun to take either.

 

That's called being a shitty coach. If the coach doesn't have the time for his top runners he should be shanked.

 

I chose to cover h.s. track last spring as a beat because, basically, I was to the point that I could cover baseball or softball in my sleep and wanted the challenge of taking on something I'd never done before. I'd spent the previous four years covering exclusively big-time college football and basketball, and was doing a stringing gig while I was between stages of life.

Challenge was right ...

 

Wow, I thought it was just my shop. "And now for the girls meet" makes me break out in a cold sweat. On a side note, after about 30 years we are no longer taking full agate for track. Think about this, we would take top 3 in each event for agate. After 15 track meets you can imagine the amount of space it took up. I measured it for 3 weeks in the spring a couple of years ago and we were running twice as much track agate than any other sport.

Through an act of Congress (actually, told management it was either hire someone else or only winners) we finally have equality of coverage.

 

Covering track is easy. Every event has a paper trail. Coaches can't be everywhere at once, so the score sheets are submitted to the coaches/scorekeepers get a look at em. They will have the athlete name, the school and the distance/height. There's your results for five events. All these events will be done by the time the 2 mile rolls around, so you can scribble down the results during that event.

The rest of the events? Just get a watch. Your not going to have the same times as the coaches in any of the events under the 400 meter but it will help you check against what he/she has.

 

The coaches who call to my shop just give me the winners. I never really said one way or the other, but I'm not complaining. Now, I'll run the top-three for conference championship meets, but other than that, I just take what I get.

 

I enjoy covering track live, but don't want anything to do with it over the phone.

 

The thing with track is that a meet between two schools is no big deal. So it wouldn't be great to cover and you probably aren't going to get solid information most of the time.

But I always enjoyed covering a bigger meet. Always something to focus in on. And you can interview kids while it's going on.

 

When I was taking results in my big-city paper job way back when, we had a set of established "standards" for track and swimming. The prep editors would determine the minimum numbers, and any of the team's members who met or exceeded those stats got in. Not as bad as it could be but two main problems were that it could be very time-consuming (especially for the loaded schools) and you'd always get a couple coaches a night trying to get in someone below the line and he/she would start saying "But such-and-such was the standard last year."