My favorite column ever... so far

High school favoritism overstated

By David Trinko (column)

You’ve figured it out. This newspaper hates your favorite high school.

It also hates your favorite sport at that high school. It’s part of a conspiracy we’ve been working on for years, and we nearly have it perfected now.

That’s why there’s never enough coverage of your team in these pages. That’s why your big showdown with the No. 3 team in your district wasn’t covered by one of our writers. That’s why the roundup item on it appeared on page B4.

You know exactly why:

• The newspaper’s always favored your rival, and it always will.

• All the newspaper cares about is the big schools.

• The writers just don’t understand soccer. If they did, they’d want to do every single game they could, even on their days off.

• All the newspaper cares about is the small schools.

• Soccer psyches up the writers so much, they’re ignoring the most important sport, baseball.

• The sports editor’s holding a grudge because he dated one of your school’s teachers once, and she never returned his phone calls.

• No one really appreciates track. Or tennis. Or softball. Or tiddlywinks.

• The cicadas’ constant chirping must’ve knocked all sense of fairness and balance out of management’s heads.

• All of the writers are colorblind, so they have problems distinguishing jerseys when watching your school’s games.

• The writers don’t like the athletes on your favorite team, for no apparent reason.

• You hung up on the sports editor once when you called to complain about coverage, and he’s punishing your school.

• The staff at the newspaper just doesn’t understand how hard the players on your team are working or what good kids they are.

Good work, Sherlock. You’ve compiled an impressive list of conspiracy theories. The only problem is they’re all wrong.

It’s been a disheartening spring to work at this newspaper. About two years ago, this very space hailed the spring season as the purest of them all because athletes simply competed for their own joy. Now the most nefarious character in the sporting world spoiled it, the overzealous parent looking for publicity for a team.

Literally every day this week, at least one angry parent dialed up the Daily to complain about how unfair our coverage had been recently. That number, for the unhappy people who haven’t dialed it yet, is (800) 296-5137, any weekday from 4 p.m. to midnight. Just ask for the sports editor, David Trinko. He loves complaint calls.

Please stop to think in an unbiased way before you pick up that phone and start swearing at a stranger.
This newspaper covers 13 high schools. Most of those schools field some combination of eight different teams in the spring. That includes baseball, softball, boys soccer, girls soccer, boys tennis, girls tennis, boys track, girls track and, yes, even one boys volleyball team.

After taking out the schools that don’t participate in some events, that still leaves 90-plus teams. Believe it or not, it becomes this paper’s goal to distribute the coverage as equally among those 90 teams as possible.

To facilitate that, we track how many stories cover a team's sporting event and how many times photographs of that team appear in the newspaper with an elaborate Excel worksheet.

The average team in the Daily’s coverage area has had three game stories and one feature story written about it by the end of the regular season. The majority of teams get at least two photographs over the course of the spring.

The formula for coverage stays immensely simple. Each team in most sports gets as close to the same coverage over the course of the season as possible.

Baseball teams get twice as much coverage, since fan attendance is about twice as much at every baseball game than at any other event. We lovingly label this the “butts-in-seats rule” around the office, and it remains one of the most accurate gauges of interest in all of sports.

We’ve had to develop this kind of thinking because all of these sports tend to play on the same nights, Tuesdays and Fridays. A subtle hint for the athletic directors in the crowd: If you schedule soccer games on Mondays and Thursdays, they’ll get more coverage and probably more fans.

To complicate matters, there are limits to anything anyone ever tries to do. Strangely enough, the higher-ups haven’t approved a budget to get full-time writers to cover each of those 90 teams, as the salaries alone would total $1.8 million per year if they paid enough to keep them above the poverty line.

Even if the paper could cover all those events, it wouldn’t have the room for all the stories. We’ve experimented with printing six different stories all in the same spot on the page, but the results are best described as “garbled.” So instead, we settle for sending four of five writers out.

So we have what we have. It’s not perfect, but it’s one of the most aggressive high school coverage schemes in the country. The Daily’s practice of running a feature story every day about a different high school sport and a different team over the course of an entire season is unmatched.

Our writers miss perfectly good sporting events because the man who assigns the events — that same guy you might’ve addressed with an obscene word just before you hung up on him — was trying to keep the coverage balanced.

Generally, the complaints are an acceptable part of the job. It’s not fun hearing someone say you’re not working hard enough as you think back to last week’s 60-hour workweek, but it’s part of the job. Most fans are reasonable once they think about what they’re saying and how unrealistic their demands really are.

The only satisfaction is knowing that in the past two years, angry parents from every single school we cover called about how we disregarded their child’s team — yes, even that rival we tend to favor so much.

This plea goes out to those who are still complaining. Be realistic. Think about all the other deserving teams that also should get attention. Be patient. Know that if your team’s really that good, it’ll be around plenty of time in the playoffs for everyone to fall in love with the players the same way you have.

Most of all, realize this newspaper doesn’t have any favorite or least favorite teams.

Well, except for your rival. We love them. And we hate your favorite school.

R Contact Sports Editor David Trinko at dtrinko@nvdaily.com. His column appears Saturdays in Northern Virginia Daily Sports.