Who are weekly newspapers covering high school football games for

Pretty much...

Also, don't think for a minute that mental notes don't get made about people who can stand up and talk about shanking the game-tying PAT or throwing five picks. It's easy for Joe Hero to stand up and answer the questions after the big win, I learn a lot more about Johnny F'dup when he answers them after a loss.

 

Just write that the kicker is a total loser and destined to cook french fries for a living. [/sarcasm]

 

Don't forget to put his home and cell phone numbers in the story and tell everyone to call him at 3 a.m. to tell him he sucks.

 

This is what I've never understood about the process of weeklies and have fought this at my paper which owns a ton of them:

Do you pick up SI to find out the results of anything? It's a weekly magazine.

In my mind, it should be the same. Utilize your web site. Post gamers there the morning after they happen. Blog 3-4 times a week depending on how much you have to do aside from the sports department, amount of space you have to fill.

If your Web site is driven by ads, which are driven by hits (and most are), find out what program tracks those hits, promo what you're doing in the regular section and then compare those hits on a "last year this day" basis.

Show 'em to you bosses, and if they don't give you a raise, put your results on a resume. You'll get some sports editor's attention. It would get mine.

On the regular section, don't leave out the gamer, just do a 5-10 incher and attach an extended box score. Write a longer story, a feature maybe on the player of the game.

With the rest of your space, give the people new news. Do an advance. Alternate between player feature or analysis of this is the guy they need to stop if a stud is coming into town.

 

Mr. X, thanks for your response.
When in doubt, report the facts. Tell people what happened, who played well, and who did not.
If, to use the hypothetical advance elsewhere, a quarterback throws three interceptions, write it, and, if possible, explain why the defense was so apt to pick him off. Kid fumbles on the 3 and costs his team the go-ahead touchdown in the final minute, it's got to go in.

 

Over the years, I've adopted this thinking about naming kids.

First of all SWNAJ, nobody's saying you "call out" a kid who commits errors that decide the game. But not mentioning them is silly.

Beyond that, my thinking is this: Everybody this kid cares about is going to know what happened before this story appears in the paper -- his friends, his classmates, his family. This is even more true for a weekly. You're not going to embarrass him or her any more by printing the name.

You don't have to run a list of every error made by every kid in the game. But if it's varsity high school sports, mentioning the names of key players is NOT improper, even if it involves a mistake.

I suppose I could be convinced that if you have a picture of the key error, that maybe that's not necessary. But mentioning the name ins't wrong.

 

I've been in the weekly game a while, and I really don't get the idea of homerism in the slant of stories that some seem to feel weeklies promote. Yes, you're inherently covering a hometown team in most cases, but no, you don't bury the inherent stories that exist.

If the home team wins, it wins. If it loses, it loses. You provide a straight account of the game and get their take on how that happened. If a quarterback threw up a bad pass and it was picked, you report it. Period.

I'm not opposed to a fair amount of play-by-play in stories - sometimes I think as an industry we have cut that out too much, especially in the daily markets. There is a broader story to tell using it. That said, obviously, focus on the important parts.

The best thing going for weeklies is the idea that you generally have more time for analysis of the game, and of the big picture trends for a team. That makes your story relevant even later in a week.

 

Weekly sports stories need to be about analysis and looking ahead.

Obviously, the season's over, but was getting to this level of the playoffs expected? Why or why not? What happened in the game and the playoffs that could forecast success/failure for next season?

In small town weeklies, most everyone will know the result almost immediately. You need to provide some perspective on what that game means for down the road, be it next week or next year.

 

I find it amusing that the ad on this page is basically the history of the Yankees through the NY Times, pretty much a scrapbook.

 

I did not receive any comments about this story, meaning few people care what was written, few people care about this team, few people care enough to write or people were satisfied by what was written.

 

Sorry, sportswriter not a junky, I have to agree that your approach is misguided and sexist, especially refusing to count WNBA players as pros. Sportschick, well said in response to the sexist part.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be a bit more sensitive when dealing with high school athletes than pros. We should. But you still have to report the facts of what happened on the field and it is not calling players out when we do that.

If you can't bring yourself to write anything that might hurt somebody's feelings, you aren't doing your job.

 

outofplace,

For the first part, as for acknowledging the WNBA as pros, that's not me. It's my paper. Like many other WNBA cities, our WNBA writer is a preps writer with the WNBA responsibilities thrown on him. We don't have a WNBA beat writer. We don't travel to any WNBA games, not even in the playoffs. We seldom attend a WNBA practice, and if we do, it's always for a feature, which of course is always feel good. It's simply a different type of coverage than MLB/NFL/NBA/NHL/Big-time college football/Big-time college men's basketball, where we cover every game, home and away, and attend every window of media availability. And it's based on readership interests, not gender.

For the second part, I still don't think any high school story should hurt anyone's feelings. You're dealing with teenagers, not even college age kids, where, gosh, I remember I still wasn't exactly mentally mature. Drives me nut when I see other reporters questioning a high school kids decision and then seeing him/her freak out or say something incriminating, whether to him/herself or a teammate, and then even worse, seeing that quoted in the paper's next edition, where surely it caused that athlete some strife.

In fact, I know for sure it caused strife because often times when small talking with a coach or parent, they'll mention that 'yeah, last month the Podunk Press printed this that caused that to my son/daughter.' And then I'd mention, 'yeah, there's no place for that in high school sports coverage. It's supposed to be all positive.' And then we'd agree and carry on the conversation.

Our paper's ethics policy specifically states that we give leeway to people who aren't accustomed to or not mature enough to deal with media. This easily fits into that realm, IMHO.