Tips for coaches

Full disclosure: I’ve never coached a game in my life.

I’ve played under plenty, in a half-dozen-odd sports, both team and individual. But, formally, I’ve never once picked up a clipboard or written out a lineup card or dealt with an overbearing parent.

I grew up the son of a Pennsylvania high school basketball coach, so I know the kind of hours the job entails. But, again, I’ve never done it myself.

What I have done is covered coaches for newspapers and magazines. Plenty of coaches in plenty of sports. Some, I’ve genuinely liked. Some, not so much. Hardly any, though – especially the younger ones – knew a great deal about the particular in’s and out’s of dealing with us sports media-types.

Horror stories abound: the “just a score” phone calls, the tongue-lashings after innocuous stories and, on occasion, the complete lack of information of any sort. Some of the nicest, most honest headmen I’ve dealt with have been among the most clueless in how to help me do my job – which, when covering prep sports, is essentially promoting each coach and his charges. So, to try to facilitate the process on both ends, here’s a quick checklist for coaches at all levels on dealing with the media, straight from the source:

1. We’re not out to get you. While there are some bad apples in the sport writing bunch, we, for the most part, prefer to dwell on the positive – it’s more fun (and easier) to write. Dirty little secret here: If you’re decent and genial to us, we’ll be the same to you in print. Nice guys make for nice copy and, unless you’re out-and-out awful to us, we like you. A little decency goes a long, long way.

2. Personally, we don’t care who wins. I don’t mean that as a grandiose statement on how the media tries to be “unbiased” and “Fair and Balanced” – I simply mean that, in half-a-dozen years, I’ve never seen someone out-and-out root for a team to win or lose for personal reasons. There’s nothing more ridiculous than phone calls telling me we’re OBVIOUSLY biased toward team X or team Y because of reason A or reason B. Chances are, we’ve gotten the exact opposite call at some point.

3. Access and information from you lead to copy inches from us. It’s not rocket science that it’s easier to write about a team that I know a lot about, and, with some three dozen schools in my paper’s coverage area, the only way we find out a lot is straight from the source. One of your kids is having a great year? E-mail us stats! Kid coming up on his 1,000th point? Call! Close to clinching your first league title in a decade? Let us know! We can’t write about what we never knew about. The Red Sox pay a lot of money to media go-betweens; as a high school coach, the job is yours. If we know about it, we will write about it, and that’s to both of our benefits.

4. Make yourself available. If we have your contact information (home phone, cell phone and e-mail address), it’s that much easier for us to get your voice out there. There are a few dummies who will bug you during dinner or late at night, but, for the most part, we’re not going to be waking up your family with 1 a.m. phone calls. And no, we won’t give it out to the public, even if someone asks.

5. Get us your results, win or lose. There are no coaches we respect more than those we hear from after every game, meet or match, regardless of the score. They’re the ones who get the publicity, and whose kids consistently get the recognition in print (and, perhaps, a little extra pull in our award selections). Conversely, we absolutely look down upon coaches who only get us scores and highlights during hot streaks and winning seasons.

6. Be complete, and be ready. When you call/e-mail/fax in information, try to have first and last names and any relevant stats ready. Getting your kids’ names in the paper shouldn’t be a painful or time-consuming process for either of us. It’s as simple as reading off a score sheet and spelling out the difficult stuff.

7. When we’re wrong, correct us. The worst mistake in a newspaper is one that’s repeated, day after day. If we screw up a name/misstate your record/give the wrong kid credit for a goal/any of the other myriad mistakes we make, let us know. It’s your right, and we won’t hold it against you.