do you ever read the paper?

Our local media does a fairly good job with their coverage of High School Football. All of our local TV stations do a Friday night recap show with scores, highlights, and coaching interviews. Our local fish-wrap gives alot of press to High School football. Everyone seems to keep thing on the positive side so its hard to complain.

Now the local "High School football message boards" in our area can be just plain mean spirited. Not just calling out teams and coaches but individual high school players as well. I try to stay off of those. It just seems to me that it is too easy to give voice to those who should not speak.

We have an extremely unique writer in our area. He thinks it is a good idea to give all of the players nicknames. He continuously makes fun of other teams and their players and his writing is terrible. There are numerous errors and mistakes in his stories, including jumping from topic to topic with no transition.

I have tried to avoid talking to him for a story.

there are a couple in our area i really wonder what their background is with football (and sports in general, for that matter) as they seem to have no clue as to what is really happening and just re-use cliche after cliche. now, one is going so far as to make suggestions as to how we could fix our team by printing his ideas and how they would solve our problems. i keep waiting for him to actually show me some plays

one suggestion he gave to help run the ball: 7 offensive lineman, our 2 best backs "side by side" with our fullback in the middle... he called it the wing-t. "the defense won't know which back is going to carry it or which back to key on". alas ... still waiting for him to give me his playbook so i can install it....

WOW as the Guiness beer guys say...Brilliant...this guy could really be on to something.

In all seriousness I was once told that local newpapers were written so that someone with an 8th grade reading level could understand...and that's the real news. I try not to read the papers much but sometimes even I can't help myself, sometimes I wonder about those guys...and to believe they actually graduated from somewhere to get that job. Some of them aren't too bad though.

I remember when I was in HS there was a column by a guy calling himself Hoople or something like that, he covered HS and College Football and there was always a contest called beat Hoople and we would read it and make our predictions in study hall. Every tough game we had he would always pick against us and even give sound reasoning as to how the other team was that much better than us. All through HS we would read it and get mad at this guy. My senior year I injured my knee and was done for the season so the HC and DC decided to make me a coach (an actual coaching assistant and not a ball boy) (even went so far as to make calls to get me on as a student coach at Virginia Tech) anyways it was during this time that I learned that the Hoople guy was actually one of our biggest boosters.

Come to think of it, it was a pretty entertaining column usually. I remember one of the teams in our district that were terrible he picked to get beat by that that scrappy team by the name of BYE WEEK.

every thing but the obit and editorial pages.

obit is about death

letters to the editor are people who have way tooooo much time on their hands. if they would be working, then they would have less time to complain.

The paper where I am now does a good job covering the team. But where I used to be...it was a joke. The guy would literally make up quotes from me and stick them in the paper. He would take the stats accurately (sometimes) but then if he did not talk to me would stick in some quote about what I might have said then pass it off as reality. Once I was "quoted" as saying something and it could have been taken the wrong way so I did call him on it. After that I was never "quoted" again. So I do read the paper b/c I want to know what is being said about me or the team.

Let me tell ya the guy who ran that paper was a first class village idiot. So I never got too upset with anything he wrote..the whole town knew he was an idiot too. But just the same I read his garbage to know what was being written.

Never pick fights with men you buy thier paper by the ton and thier ink by the gallon.

IMHO, the main purpose of the the printed press these days is to keep the recycling industry afloat.

If you're not happy with your local HS writer, then get your own! We get one or two kids - try to get them early as 9th graders - and call them our SID's. They travel with us on the road and they're on the sideline at home. We give them stats form our adult stat people and then let them get coach and player quotes. They write their own articles that we post on our school website and in the hallways. We also send them onto the paper via email/fax with our stats. Many times we will see our kid's write up info the next day in the paper. Sometimes we still get nothing, but very seldom have we been slammed or questioned by the paper's "expert".

I stay away form the papers, news, and internet forums that talk about us…there are two reasons for this the news and papers also have {censored} in them about the 5 drive-bys that happened in Detroit (just an example) and the people who write about us will always miss-quote and modify the story to read how they want it and since they know nothing about football it turns our really bad…the worst one is the internet football forum in our area. It is full of parents and fans form the area and it is really negative and bad…it got so bad last year that we decided to put a ban on it so that the kids would not read it. We still check it out form time to time to make sure our kids are not on it. Oh and you can make up a screen name with out having to register any information.

The local sports writer that covers HS sports around here is an idiot. There's no pleasant way to describe the guy- he's an idiot. He knows nothing about the schemes in football yet he will. passive-aggressively attack coaches and their offenses. Any offense that throws the ball at all is described as a "complicated college-style offense"- verbatum. He's fallen in love with the Wing T and will build it up on to the stars (even when they don't produce) but continually berates anybody that runs anything else.

"So and so, the Bulldog's quarterback struggled all night long with Such-and-Such High's extremely complex passing offense" This is an actual line from his article. The offense he's describing is a Joe Gibbs H-back offense that runs the ball 30-40 times a game. The QB threw the ball like 15 times all game- almost all off of PA. He got ribbed on because he had one INT and no TDs The dude assumes that because they run single back that they're the second coming of Texas Tech.