SW4A All Conference

I thought the Observer was bad until I saw the baseball coverage in the Raleigh News and Observer.It makes the C.Observer look like Baseball America! You would think especially since a team from the east won the championship game they would have at least written an article about it...didn't happen...unless I missed something.

 

If FV had won the championship, I imagine that the Raleigh N&O would have done better.

For some reason, Rose and ECU are not favorites of the Raleigh press.

 

He may deserve whatever, but make sure you get your facts straight. Langston was reassigned to the Piedmont schools last fall and Cliff Mehrtens is partially responsible for coordinating high school coverage.

As for the awards, the season just ended last weekend. Not sure what the delay is, but I do know a couple of folks are on vacation (oh hey, what a concept).

be patient. the stuff will come out. if there's no story, the lists will be in scoreboard. also, if the conference (whichever it is) doesn't send in their picks, then it can't be published. all-observer honors should come out soon.

 

mediafreak .....

You are adressing a symptom, not the problem. The problem is that the High School sports coverage in the Observer is spotty at best. More often, it's completely absent.

How much weight can an All-Observer Team carry when the paper and voters won't spend the time/effort to actually see the players until "playoffs" roll around.

The coverage seems to be restricted to the closest school to the Observer offices that happens to be doing well in a particular sport. Not what you call un-biased, complete coverage, is it.

A TRUE World Class Paper meets the needs of it's readers and covers all of the local events. The Observer falls short of being "World Class", "First Class" and even "Second Class" .... There is great things happening in a lot of different sports in this area that are being ignored.

As for the All-Conference Lists in particular, they are released by the conferences when the last team from that conference is eliminated from the playoffs. Except for the Big South 3A and the SW4A in this area, that's been about 3 weeks. I guess they don't type fast over at the Observer either.

 

NCBB, good point. But I have a question. What about the players? I am sure there is someone from each school who should be able to list their all-conference players. I know Rob Wilson got player of the year, but what about the rest? Wilson, can you help? Woody? Anybody???????

 

gonzo ...

nice idea, but we don't have posters from every school...... particularly in the Meca 8. I'd love to know both conferences. It may take awhile to find out.

 

Relaying a message

passing this along from one of the prep writers:

FROM: Observerinsider

Thanks for your concern and care about the all-conference teams. We probably care about them more than you think, at least I do...So that you can have the TRUTH about why you haven't seen them in the paper, I'll let you in on a little-known fact.

You're right that the conference doesn't release the teams until the last team from that conference is out. However, this season some sports instituted a NEW policy. They wouldn't release the teams until the playoffs were finished, no matter if a conference had any teams in the title game or not....ALSO: Even though they have that policy, The Charlotte Observer regularly does NOT receive the all-conference teams until 1, 2 or even 3-4 weeks after the playoffs. We just received the SW4A all-conference teams yesterday (they'll be in Saturday's paper) and we still have not received the ME-CA 8 4A all-conference teams....we're still waiting for them like you guys. The fault lies in the conferences holding on to the teams a month or two after they were named. The sad part is that the teams are named BEFORE the playoffs begin or AT THE BEGINNING of the playoffs, but the conference holds the teams for publication because they're afraid of people's feelings being hurt. That's sad. Everyone knows who the studs are, so why not release the teams? Can this change? Only if parents get involved. What happens with the spring sports is this: The person who has the power to release the team holds the team until the end of the playoffs, school lets out, people go on vacation, then it's out of sight, out of mind...and it never gets published....We have even called the coaches to get the teams and they don't even have them. It's in the hands of the conference chair person or some other person who is the responsible for releasing the teams. Again, unfortunately, it doesn't get done half the time OR when it is released, it's halfway through the next season and is irrelevant. Case in point: During basketball season, we called numerous coaches trying to get the all-SW4A team. No one seemed to have it. They even called the mystery chair person responsible for getting us the team and still we didn't get anything. It was halfway through the spring season before we got the team and it came from a coach who gave us the team off the top of his head because the chair person wouldn't give it to us....

So, hopefully that will explain and quench any conspiracy theories you guys have about us and the all-conference teams.

Sincerely,

Observerinsider

 

from May 4 Observer (Page 2)

from the desk of Observer sports editor Mike Persinger:

Let's talk high schools. Why do you do the Sweet 16 for football and basketball but not for other sports?

The Sweet 16 is one of the most controversial things we do because of the passion people have for their schools, and because we rank teams on their chances to win a state title in their classification, not necessarily on how they'd do against other teams in the poll. With football and basketball, we see enough games to be reasonably sure we're not missing anyone. In other sports, we risk being wrong, to the point of being unfair to good teams.

That's easy to solve, just cover those other sports more.

That's not as easy as you think. With 105 high schools in our circulation area and three high school reporters, Cliff Mehrtens, Langston Wertz Jr. and Brett Honeycutt, plus bureau reporters Kevin Cary (Gaston) and Denny Seitz (York), we can't cover everything. We try to hit the big moments for our schools, and use freelancers, but covering high schools is a big job.

So just add more space.

I'd love to, but like any business, we live with a budget. We have a certain amount of space to allocate through the year, and we divide it based on what's going on. May, with the Wachovia Championship and the races at Lowe's Motor Speedway, will have more space than July will. Newsprint is the second-highest cost for the newspaper in the overall budget, after salaries and benefits. We try to use it wisely.

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Translation: To get more, the paper (and readers) give up more. So what would you give up? It's a question asked in every newsroom. The Observer's budget doesn't quite compare to that of papers in Dallas and Miami and Philly. You notice there are more notebooks and roundups during the school year? Those are intended to log stories the paper doesn't get on deadline.

Am I speaking for the paper? By no means, or else I'd use a more obvious name. Some folks on this board know me and my credibility (which seems to be a popular word of late in journalism). I just thought I'd stick up for fellow journalists from the bashing.

 

down here in florida, they are just releasing the all-state baseball teams this week.

by the way, the bigger the paper, the less important coverage of prep sports is. they lose out to pro and college sports.

there's a limited number of column inches available to dedicate to any sport and any level, so the ones with the largest level of interest win out. the problem with prep sports is that the average prep sports fan is interested in his/her team, but could give a rat's behind about the other schools.

now, if you're in a smaller city, like where i am (tallahassee, fl.) preps are pretty important. we've got a separate football magazine coming out this fall to preview the football season. then again, we've only got 30 schools in our coverage area, and just seven city schools.

 

Before you guys go criticizing the Observer about there coverage of baseball, by saying that basketball gets everything, lets be fair to the basketball teams. They had horrible coverage of the SW4A this year, even though they had the second best team in the city. The observer will not cover any of the "south charlotte" high schools, for whatever reason, no matter how bad they would beat the "west/north" schools. you can take it how you want, but there is a whole lot of bias in the CO's coverage. I do agree that their coverage was horrible, until the finals, which had some pretty good articles, even if one of them was only about where a kid play T-Ball, not about their current team ...lol Rob! So before you praise their coverage of basketball, lets just all realize that the HS Sports reporters here just suck! I think braves and gonzo will understand where this post is coming from!