Over the three years I’ve been here, I’ve ended up making the same well-intentioned mistake that a lot of times, ends with the same result.
A team has a really good season, I write a story to highlight said team’s season and try my best to include as many names of players as possible and within the confines of space I have available.
However, I’ve noticed the last time I was in this situation that I was beginning to get anxious while writing the story. Perhaps I knew what was coming, that a parent would complain about a name being left out.
Because I’m not a parent, I have not experienced how it feels to raise an infant into a growing athletic teenager. I’m told that for many parents, the worst feeling is knowing that your child’s heart is hurting and if they don’t get the mention we feel that they deserved, there’s that worry that they could be feeling pain. And it’s also nice to be praised in print...or so I’ve been told.
Honestly, I scroll down my dad’s Facebook page sometimes just to remind myself what he has accomplished and what he means to the people that really like to hear his music. It feels wonderful to see another person praise someone you love and truly care about. I know first-hand that I feel a sense of pride from that.
But the reality is that I cover nine different teams during the fall with cross country, football and volleyball and that doesn’t even count when I try to cover junior high or junior varsity sports in Rockdale. Sometimes coaches send rosters, but there are always students moving up or down from junior varsity, kids quit and sometimes the roster is not identical to the one I receive, and it’s very hard to keep track of everyone and makes me very apt to missing someone when I attempt to be inclusive.
Recently, I had a situation where a few names were left out of a season-ending story that I had to shorten quite a bit, and instead of contacting me or contacting the head coach of the team, a parent went directly to their school board to complain about the coach because of a story that the coach didn’t even lift a finger to type.
If you’re a parent that ends up in this situation and feel you need your voice heard, contact me please. I’m the one who wrote the story and I’ll either apologize for leaving your child out or I’ll explain why I only mentioned seven of the 13 kids instead of all 13 players or how in a post-Alcoa economy, we don’t have as many pages to write longer stories and that makes it difficult to add more details.
I understand that there has to be a feeling of disappointment after seeing your kid’s team on the front page and reading through the entire story only to see your child not mentioned, but that is not the way to go about it.
It’s okay to feel sad or even upset about your kid not being brought up or even feeling like they don’t get the recognition they deserve.
Just please don’t compromise a hard-working person’s means of feeding their family and paying their bills. You wouldn’t want someone coming to your job angry at you and going directly to your manager over something that you had nothing to do with.
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