awriter said:
MilanWall said:
Hey all. Been lurking for a while, but making this my first official post. Here's the deal. I'm a sportswriter in my first job out of college, working at a weekly newspaper in a Southern state. Part of my section each week is a column, and usually during football season I make predictions of the local high school games - typical stuff really. This year, for the local team's opening game, I picked them to lose 33-30 on the road to a rival in a neighboring city. The game was played tonight, and the home town team won in triple overtime. After the game, I went to the coach for comment and was told off with a curt, "I'm not speaking to you, you can go talk to (other team's coach) if you want comment." Attempts to get quotes from assistant coaches were also unsuccessful.
After the game when the team was leaving the locker room to get back on the buses, I met the coach again. He explained that he was not commenting because I "would expect our home town paper to pick the home town team." I said that I wrote an objective column and said it would be a close game - it wasn't like I picked the team to get blown out in a loss. He then said, "If it's a close game, I expect you to pick the home town team. I'm not commenting this week, but you can talk to me after the next game as long as there's no further problems."
Yuck. This is the first major fiasco I've been involved in. How do I handle this? I did get quotes from the losing coach.
My guess is this will blow over quickly. Don't worry about it. Tell your editor what happened and if it continues to be a problem, go to the AD, principal, superintendent, etc. Just continue to do your job and don't be intimidated by this guy.
That said, predictions are lame. I would nix them after this season. It's probably too late to do so now.
I totally agree. Predictions are stupid. It's freaking high school. And any level is basically unpredictable. Even a team with a god awful 99 game win streek or lose streek can have a QB come in or some other player and tear the other team a new butthole, or a good team could all be tripping on acid because the other team really sucks bad. No telling what might happen. Predictions just pish people off, but it's too late now. Keep picking teams. Next year, do something different.
If you have to pick teams, try the advantage/disadvantage thing. Say advantage: home team, after summing up the strengths of the home and away teams and each teams' weaknesses.
When I get coaches that won't talk to me or after I've given them ample time to return my calls, or the coaches that won't talk only after losses, well then I just begin to ignore those coaches and those teams until a parent takes notice. Then I get the call or the drop-in. I explain as a meek, little timid gerbile that I'm at the coach's mercy for information because I have X-squared amount of teams to cover and only a 60 hour workweek, and I only use the info that I get. If I don't get info or cooperation, then I have to focus on the teams that provide me with adequate info and access.
This usually gets results, but make sure when talking to the parent or whomever is bitching to be really nice and represent the offending coach as best you can. Don't ever say that the coach in question is a dickhead or anything like that. Just say that compare them to the other teams' coaches that are getting covered, and say the other coaches are doing better in getting you access and info.
This works like a charm, or has so far. After I tried this in one community several years ago, the offending coach called me and apologized up and down the ladder, and then added, which is priceless, something like: "I hate the g-d media, you're all a bunch of friggin' turd suckers and on countless times the sports writers have cost me games. But g-d-mit, my job's on the line and I got to do what the boosters say. So we've got to reach some kind of understanding."
I wanted to say "is that on the record?" but I knew it would make matters worse. After that, coach and I got along fine, but he still got fired because his team sucked.
And this kind of situation is always worse when you're new to a paper.
