Varsity Kansas - The Blog

A coach recently e-mailed me — in an extremely respectful fashion, mind you — about how he was frustrated with a story concerning his team. There were no errors, simply what he considered a miss by the reporter. He felt that his team wasn’t given its due respect, instead overlooked in favor of the other team, considered its win an upset, etc.

I understand his point. I do. But it’s tough to know what to say. The reporter didn’t do anything wrong, he didn’t commit any error, he simply wrote it as he saw it.

Reporters are cautioned to not go into any situation with preconceived notions, thus preventing bias. But, for instance, it’s a difficult thing to not pay attention to records, especially if you’re not as familiar with both teams.

And then there’s the saying that we have in journalism — Send five people to cover the same story/event, they’ll have five different perspectives.

I thought about that a lot last week as I wrote my game stories. I know what I saw, I trusted what I saw, but what were the coaches thinking? Would they have agreed with me? And what about fans? How did their view differ?

Now, that didn’t change how I wrote my stories, but it is fascinating. I would say that most fans think we’re too hard on their own team (we focused on turnovers as opposed to steals), that we don’t give their team enough love (we have good players, too! Don’t just write about the No. 1 team). I would think coaches wish we would print certain quotes over others that they made.”

My goal is to be as fair as possible to both teams, but if I’m covering an area team vs. a non-area team (for example, Maize vs. Blue Valley), I focus on Maize win or lose because that’s where my readership is.

But there is limited space and limited time, so key points do get left out. Two recent examples from my work include Southeast’s Jordan Cyphers’ spectacular block of Northwest’s Chris Harper’s fastbreak layup attempt. Cyphers blocked it so perfectly that the ball stuck between the rim and the backboard. Another example is from Maize’s third-place game when Brittney Bell kicked SM North’s Michelle Counts. What didn’t make the story, due to space reasons, was Maize coach Craig Lungwitz’s response — She’s a good kid. She made a mistake, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a good kid.

I truly wish we could make everyone happy. But we don’t.

As Hays coach Rick Keltner said, though, sportswriters are like coaches “We can never please everyone.”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 8:57 p.m. and is filed under Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.