Crosscountry Coverage in Newspaper

[800trackmom]

How well is crosscountry covered in the newspapers around the state. Hopefully a lot better than it is in the Chattanooga area. The article in the Chattanooga Time Freepress on yesterday's region races was terrible. In reference to the A-AA girl's race, the writer wrote that there was two minutes difference in first and second when it was like 5 seconds difference. I hope other areas get better press.

[adambchs]

and last year in track jeff was our "senior sprinter" and they said people were in events they weren't in and said that caleb was our fastest miler just becuase jeff let him win

[peacemaker]

LOL- This is true too Adam- You are really on top of things! Im impressed

 

Jeff did let him win- Thank God it was only in the weekly and not the banner! Jeff would have made them print a retraction on that one!

[800trackmom]

Of course as bad as the Chattanooga paper's coverage of crosscountry is, they do still cover it. Shame on the Cleveland Banner for not providing any crosscountry coverage. Wonder how many other sport have every team from Bradley Country qualify for state? I really do think the writer for the Chattanooga paper could have done a little better job. I mean he gave two lines to the McMinn boys who won Region 3AAA and were last year's state champs. Surely there was a story in there somewhere. Or the match up between Jackie Pickle and Tiffany Palmer, it got two lines too. And the Bradley girls championship was just sort of implied. He did give CCS some coverage but then he got his times all wrong. I understand football is king and gets most of the coverage this time of year, but volleyball and soccer get a lot more coverage than crosscountry (and of course the coverage at track time is just not there) I certainly hope other newspapers across the state do better.

[peacemaker]

Ditto and A-men!

[CherokeeChief]

Our paper actually had someone there and did a great job. We even made the top portion of the front page which was nice. They haven't seen fit to cover us all year, so today makes up for that some. I tried to get them to do a pre-season article on us because of last year and I was told that we lost most of our team so they didn't see how it was relevant now. I'm just about resigned to the fact that our sport just isn't covered very much or very well, but it's hard for our athletes when they work for hundreds of hours and run literally thousands of miles and are barely recognized. I even offered to provide all the copy they would need for the paper and our paper said all they really needed were "the times". If anyone has any more suggestions, I'd like to hear them. I hope everyone can get some positive press elsewhere. But again, we did get a good write-up with pictures and all today, so that's a definite positive.

[runnerboy]

We started to get alot of press after we made it to state for the 4x800 in 2002 and it continued all through last year but I guess we aren't worth it now that our two studs are gone.

[MadMan1600]

LOL- This is true too Adam- You are really on top of things! Im impressed

 

Jeff did let him win- Thank God it was only in the weekly and not the banner! Jeff would have made them print a retraction on that one!

No I wouldnt have!

[Guest kenwoodrun]

You all know it basically depends on the staff and writers of the individual papers. By and large, the typical donut eating staff writer spends the majority of their day thinking about what they are going to ask Jeff Fisher in the postgame news conference knowing good and well that Fisher could care less that they exist. Clarksville's paper, no exception. It is called The Leaf Chronicle, and this entire season, it has been horrific. I sent in our individual results directly to them, in AP format emailed to them so all they had to do was copy and paste...on seven different occasions. I then physically called to confirm they had them. They printed them ONCE, and it had numerous errors that one time (how can you screw up copy and paste?) We won three or four invitationals this year, no mention even in the tiniest corner. I think a parent at Northwest put the heat on them to come to regional, so they finally sent a guy to region who I don't think had ever seen a cross country meet in his life. He tried, but the regional story wound up very small in the back of the sports section with errors and few times...despite the fact that Clarksville teams qualified three of the six AAA spots! Including a team champ (NW) and an individual champ from Rossview. We'd won it twice in a row and the last two years we got almost respectable press out of it. This year, our whole city got screwed totally. We all deserve better. Chief is right, our coverage is generally going to stink, no matter how hard the kids work. I've tried to compensate for that through the means of the internet, and I think our kids can say they have one of the better team web pages around. That helps the tiniest little bit.

[MustangRunning]

When I was across town we had a guy who would write up the whole article on our races and send it in. The people at the paper would not understand what it all meant so they would try to change it and get it all messed up so no one knew what happened. They use to try to work with us and now that we have Ryan H. back at the paper maybe we can get some good articles.

[adambchs]

I just saw 3 good articles today about us(Bradley County/Cleveland City School) in the Bradley Weekly maybe they are getting better maybe one day we will get them all the time

[biker]

The Gallatin News Examiner/Hendersonville Star News both do a good job of covering the big meets. They also include a lot of pictures of the Sumner County runners. Both newspapers are also on-line under their respective names.