ES 40 Mt Airy 0
- Thread starter bareman
- Start date
Buzz that one flew right over my head.
Let's see??
If an adult is an adult that would make them an adult.....I think........
And if children are who they are then it's got to be really them.... I hope.....
Says the guy who said ‘we’ve been watching this circus all year’’’....12-1 season called a “circus”...mt.airy fans just being mt. airy fans.
I try to identify who the best teams in a given sport are likely to be at the start of the fall, winter and spring seasons, and we try to follow those teams as much as we can, regardless which of the four schools it is. I also try to keep one reporter following the contending teams as much as I can. If you read the MA News regularly, you would have noticed that I had the MA girls for most of their two championship seasons, that Hannah King had the NS boys and girls when they made it to state in 2017 (that championship day was crazy for both of us...), I had MA football the past three seasons most of the time, and that Cory Smith had East Surry football most of this season (and will have them for the rest of their season). I think that is beneficial, because if a reporter sees the team most weeks, he or she has more insight and understanding into why that team does things.
East actually got the better deal this fall in some ways. When we had more than two teams at home, there were times we would double up on games, going to the first half at one place and the second half at another. But if East was at home, Cory stuck to East and I doubled up. Plus, he went to East (and played sports there), so I hardly think he was biased toward MA.
It's a balancing act to try to keep a focus on multiple contending teams in each season, while giving every team a fair amount of coverage even if they're not contenders, and we're doing it with just me and Cory, occasional help from my predecessor, and some from the reporters at our affiliate papers when they cover Surry County teams. You can't keep everyone happy, but we try to give everyone as much as we can.
For the most part the MA News has done a pretty good job of covering the local sports and spreading around the coverage during the past 4-5 years. The only "player" spotlight articles of current high school athletes that I can recall recently deal with players earning some sort of accolades or recognition (All-State, All-Conference, signing with a college, etc). There have been spotlight articles following former local HS talent who are now playing in college, but they have been very impartial in those also and try to cover all schools in the area. You can easily do a search of their website and see that they've covered former HS stars like Ian Holder (MA), Nick Wilson (NS), Tyler Smith (ES), just to name a few. Again, they spread out the coverage pretty well. Being a huge football/basketball/baseball fan, my only minor complaint was the lack of coverage in local HS baseball early in the year, especially compared to previous year's coverage. There were only a combined 5 articles covering MA, NS, ES, and SC baseball during the first 3 weeks of the season last year compared to probably 10-11 each for Women's Soccer and Men's Tennis(no disrespect meant to either of those sports). However, later in the season there was ample coverage of all 4 schools in baseball so it's really hard to be too upset. John Cate and Cory Smith do a good job considering there's only 2 people, 4 local high schools, and numerous sports to cover...just my $0.02 on the matter.
I know it's been a few days since this was posted, but I just now saw it and will respond.
What happened last spring with baseball/softball, as I recall, is that we had some scheduling issues--a few games were postponed that we'd put on the schedule to cover, and I was still also covering MA women's basketball. And we had several women's soccer home games that we were able to get to. With tennis, MA men's coach Rodney Pell always reports his scores to us, so he gets a lot of coverage, just like SC women's coach Holly Porter does in the fall. Plus, tennis is easy; you show up, shoot a few action shots and then the coach sends you the scoresheet later on. Oftentimes, we would hit up a tennis match and then go on to some other event.
I do a lot of stuff and people would never guess what I'm up to. If you ever see me at a basketball or football game swiping constantly on my phone, I'm not texting people. I'm actually taking notes on it. I wrote an article on another site last year about how I do it, and gave this example:
That was the scoring from the Mount Airy women's playoff game against Murphy in 2017, which MA won 40-39. You can probably interpret most of the notation--for example, "Jo 009 6run" means Jo Snow made a six-foot runner with nine seconds left (and won the game). Ten years ago, I was doing this with a pen and a reporter's notebook, and now I just need a charged-up phone.