Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 04.19.04

Covering prep sports for a newspaper, no matter its circulation, is like making a living as a septic-tank cleaner. You're underpaid, overworked and rarely appreciated by those who benefit from your services. And when something goes wrong, you get tons of shit thrown at you.

If you're covering pro or major college sports, you typically get printed statistics handed to you, instant replays to re-examine anything you missed, a climate-controlled press box, free snacks and sodas (if not free meals), near-guaranteed access to players and coaches and maybe even foot massages from the team public relations staff, if you ask nicely.

If you're covering high school sports, you keep your own stats while trying not to miss a play in a rickety wooden press box (if the school has one) as you fight off hunger pangs caused by having to race to the game straight from the office. Then, once the game is over, you have to race to the locker room to catch players and coaches before they get sucked up in a maelstrom of parents, assorted well-wishers and, depending on the sport, high school groupies.

Pro- or college-sports reporters may complain about how bad a quote some players might provide, but at least they don't have to suffer, as the prep sports reporter does, with a notebook full of teenage inarticulations such as "Yeah," "uh-huh," "Wha?" and "Mom says I gotta go." (Maybe this is why pro basketball writers seem so set against players going straight from high school to the NBA.) As for interview conditions, pro and college reporters get locker room access, a special interview room or both. Prep sports reporters hope they brought a writing implement that won't bleed into the paper while they conduct interviews in the rain.

And if pro and college reporters want to talk about the pressure of covering high-profile events, forget it. Have they ever gotten an angry call from a parent because they didn't put "All-State candidate" in front of their son's name? Have they ever been ripped by a coach telling them they need to put every team member's name in the paper, no matter what happens, because not doing so would rip apart the team's spirit? Do they have whole crews of parents, fans and boosters reading every word of a story like it's the Dead Sea Scrolls, looking for further evidence your paper is biased against their school? And calling the publisher when they think they've found it?

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Some people are very happy covering prep sports. Some people also are very happy engaging in self-mutilation. For most sportswriters, prep sports is like Genesis' "Carpet Crawlers" — you've got to get in to get out. It's a rite of passage you hope to avoid or limit before you go onto a beat with a higher profile and fewer hassles.

I know of what I speak. I learned to hate covering high school sports while at the Carmel (Ind.) Tribune, and vowed to never do it regularly again — and I hadn't got out of high school myself. When it came time after college to determine the course of my career, I chose jobs like telephone book ad designer — hey, those ads don't design themselves — over covering high school sports.

With this mind, one wonders what Wally Wakefield was thinking when he decided to while away his retirement years covering prep sports for the Maplewood Review, a weekly covering the suburbs east of St. Paul, Minn. Wakefield should have known better: He's a retired teacher.

Papers like the Review (and the Carmel Tribune) are the most toxic places to practice preps coverage. A big part of those papers' readership comes from people wanting to soak up every detail about their local school team; because the major dailies are worried about the local pro and major-college teams, they don't do preps in as much detail. Plus, people are more intimidated calling the metro paper, if only for the difficulty in negotiating the (usually automated) phone tree. They feel no compunction in reaming whatever poor sap picks up the line at, as they see it, the local rag.

If prep writers deal with shitstorms, Wakefield is dealing with an F5-level shit tornado. Wakefield, under order of the Minnesota Supreme Court, starting April 12 has been assessed a $200-a-day fine for not revealing who told him that a high school football coach failed to have his contract renewed because of his "temper, inappropriate comments and foul language," which these sources, quoted anonymously, claimed was used against parents, teachers and players. The fines run until July 19, when a trial begins in the coach's defamation lawsuit, not against Wakefield but the school district. The coach claims he needs Wakefield to reveal his sources to prove the district defamed him.

Not only is Wakefield not being sued, he didn't even write the story for which he supplied the quotes. (That writer has since moved to California.) So he's being fined in a lawsuit he's not a party to, for a story he didn't write. Let that be a warning to anyone who consider a job as a prep sports writer. But if this is the path you choose, work first as a septic-tank cleaner. You'll get a good feel for what you're in for.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.