Quality of local sports coverage goes both ways

Here it is the second week in April, half way through the high school spring sports season and some of you are probably wondering why you haven’t seen your son or daughter’s team mentioned in the pages of the Cheney Free Press. Or perhaps there was some coverage, but very miniscule – nothing that reflected the season so far.

Well, we’re trying. One of the things we take pride in is our local sports coverage, particularly high school and Eastern Washington University, and we take it seriously when we don’t feel we are providing what we should.

Everybody in editorial and some others in the office are what you’d call “sports guys,” regardless of gender, and we understand the importance of sports to communities, especially smaller cities and towns who hook their identity to how well their teams do. As such, we focus on high school sports, but we appreciate and will publish information about middle school teams, club teams or Little League.

The latter group is often difficult to do on a timely basis, mainly because of the space we devote to the high schools and Eastern. It’s been even more of a challenge since we went to a smaller format.

But we do want to get other information in, even if we aren’t out covering it, and even if it’s not immediately following the competition. A little pub never hurts.

But our focus right now is high school sports, and in my opinion some of it is lacking. You see, covering sports is a two-lane street.

Yes, there’s our lane, which means being out in the field, at the games, matches, meets getting photos and collecting information to use in writing our stories. We do this as best we can in our editorial schedule, which also includes covering community news, education news, and general interest news. We have office responsibilities such as on Tuesdays when we assemble the weekly edition – usually working until midnight – or handling daily contacts from readers or others interested in having us provide some coverage. Got to answer the phones, too.

All of this usually means we have long days, late evenings, weekend duty, nights at home making phone calls and writing. Such is the beast.

But the other lane is the community, and part of this are coaches and school district officials. We rely on them to help us by providing rosters, schedules but most importantly being accessible on a regular, timely fashion to be able to talk about their teams on a weekly basis.

At the beginning of every sports season, every year, we send out emails, make phone calls to coaches to set up a time where we can regularly talk. We try to base everything around their schedule to make it convenient because we know they’re busy, and in most cases these coaches are teachers with a lot of demands on their time educating our children.

Every year, every season, we have coaches who respond quickly, or as quick as possible, to our requests and we appreciate that. Over the course of the season that response is reflected in continuous, informative coverage and if there’s a skip, it was likely due to a miscommunication or unforeseen event that prevented contact that week.

But every year, every season, we have those who are difficult to get a hold of, or who don’t put it high on their list to contact us. Spring is usually the worst because of the large number of sports taking place.

Spring is also the hardest because of the weather, with more postponements than any other season, creating scheduling issues that coaches and school administrators have to address, creating an additional time constraint. We understand that too.

But this spring seems to be the hardest in getting information, at least in my nearly 13 years here at the Free Press. In some cases we have new coaches, but didn’t find out this information until after the seasons have started.

Please understand this, we aren’t here “singing the blues.” We understand our part and responsibility in providing good, accurate sports coverage as much as humanly possible.

We just want to give a bit of an insight to the uninformed. We’re trying, and with a little prodding, we’ll eventually get there.

See you on the sidelines.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.