By TIM TROWER
The press conference dance continues. High schools in our area call a lot of them, probably more per capita than anywhere else in the state. North Medford has one about noon today to name its new girls soccer coach. Frankly, we don’t have much use for “pressers,” something I’ve discussed for years with athletic directors, coaches and others in the community (notably bowling proprietors and auto racing promoters).
Pressers are called for late morning or early afternoon, plenty of time for TV and radio folks to get their video and sound bites and have a brief report ready for dinner-hour news. Meanwhile, our paper shows up on the doorstep 12 hours after that. We prefer not to be last in the pecking order and take steps to avoid it by calling around early and getting the news in before the presser.
That’s the dance. They don’t want us to ruin the drama (assuming there is some) by getting the story early. They take pains to avoid our calls or have the subjects ignore us until said gathering. I had a high school athlete signing a letter to an undisclosed school a couple years ago tell me on the phone, “My coach told me to tell you if you want to know, come to the cafeteria tomorrow at 3.” For our part, we don’t want to sit back and let the electronic media run all over us, which is precisely what this set-up promotes. Would a football coach tell his defense to lie down? No, so if we can get it, we do. If we don’t, we lose the dance contest. Really, I do understand the motivation said schools have to gain exposure, be it for coaches or athletes. I think they understand ours, which is to be first, fast and accurate.
This speaks to the media glare our high school kids are under. They’re the big show in a town with the region’s major newspaper and affiliates of the three big TV networks. I came from the Willamette Valley years ago, and Salem, Corvallis, Albany, none of those athletes could imagine the coverage schools get here. But that’s a different topic.
At this writing, I don’t know how the dance went. It’s early Friday morning, the newspaper hasn’t arrived and my Internet access is kaput for the time being. We got word of the presser about 5:30 last night. I left the office at about 6 with one of my staffers making calls to try to get the info. When Lu Crenshaw stepped down recently as North’s coach, we had in that story that a likely successor was her stepfather, Rich Garcia, a former North coach who had expressed interest. Last night, that’s who we thought would be named … I’ll pause here until I see if we got it in today’s paper …
(While I’m waiting, I’ll also say that we often can get the info we need with a couple calls and have it written in the time it takes us to drive to a school, sit through the presser and drive back, so there’s a time-management consideration. Oh, and much of our work is at night, so pressers often are outside our work cycle. The magnitude of the announcement determines how we adjust our schedules.)
Paper just hit the doorstep and … guess we lost. No call-backs last night, I assume, and some chasing to do today. When my Internet is back, I’ll post this.
The dance continues.
