Fans of the Maize and North football teams got Saturday’s paper and had to wonder why The Eagle had a score of the game but nothing else — no story, no statistics.
Trust me, it’s not from a lack of trying, and it’s a good time for me to explain how we get our high school football coverage in the paper.
We have two full-time reporters and a stable of 6-7 correspondents available to cover games. On Friday, we sent reporters to eight games. After those eight games, we rely on coaches or athletic directors to call us with statistics from every other game in Sedgwick, Butler and Harvey counties. For decades, the protocol has been that the home team is supposed to call area newspapers (not just us).
For the bigger area schools, we do "game boxes," which consist of 3-4 paragraphs about the game and full statistics. That’s what we had planned for North at Maize when we got the call.
But the call never came. Realizing Maize hadn’t called, we reached the Maize coach by phone and asked for his statistics. He said they were at the school and he would send them to us on Monday. We had no luck reaching the North coach.
Our frustration level was pretty high Friday night. We know that Maize and North have two of the area’s larger fan bases and would love to have had details about the game in the paper.
– Kirk