A Sacramento Bee hallmark over the years has been its treatment of high school sports or, more precisely, the publishing of athletes’ names and game results on the agate page.
That’s the page with the small print listing names and the details about scores and statistics, the numbers that are the fuel of sports.
For generations, printing a high school athlete’s name was cause for family excitement, as proud parents clipped the names of their sons and daughters and pasted them into countless scrapbooks.
It was in its modest way a link to the broader community and to establishing a sense of place. It also was a way, as one reader told me, for average people to have a personal connection to the newspaper.
But a few months ago, the sports department made a decision to change which names get printed, essentially creating a two-tiered, haves and have-nots policy. Athletes in some sports, such as baseball and softball, had their names published, while the names of others in sports such as track and field and swimming, were confined to online publication only on the paper’s Web site.
The new policy debuted with spring sports and extended to sports to be played next fall and winter.
The change wasn’t announced publicly and, as readers in the have-nots category gradually realized what had happened, they became angry. They complained to the sports department, to the paper’s senior editors, to the publisher and to me. (In the interest of disclosure, I was the paper’s previous sports editor for four years.)
Along with the e-mails and phone calls, a petition with nearly 500 names of parents and students from several high schools imploring The Bee to change its policy was dropped off at the paper.
“It’s still a big deal for most of the kids to have their names in the paper,” said Susan Larson, a Bee subscriber for more than 20 years whose daughter is a goalie on the Christian Brothers High School girls soccer team, one of the sports relegated to second-tier status. “One way to get kids strongly connected to their community is through the newspaper.”
For several reasons – from attracting young readers to the paper to the inequity of arbitrarily valuing some high school sports and athletes over others to a reliance on industry groupthink about what belongs on the agate page – I think the change in policy was ill-conceived and clumsily executed.
While I was in the midst of writing this column, the paper’s executive editor, Rick Rodriguez, rescinded the new policy for the remainder of the school year. He said he wants to evaluate the situation over the summer before implementing possible changes in the fall.
That is well and good, though from a practical view, the impact this spring will be minimal, since league championships already have begun, section playoffs begin soon and school is out next month. Moreover, the paper already was printing individual names in all sports for league championships and section playoffs.
The broader issue for the paper – and one certain to intensify in the future – is dealing with the explosive growth in new high schools, while the sports section remains strapped with finite space. For a paper of its circulation size, The Bee has one of the smallest sports sections in the country.
There are about 90 high schools in the paper’s coverage area, and that is expected to grow by three to four public schools a year for the next four to five years, said John Williams, assistant commissioner for the CIF’s Sac-Joaquin Section, the entity governing high school sports in our region.
And it’s not as if the paper ignores high school sports now, despite the agate faux pas. The sports department has three reporters, out of 17 writers and columnists, devoted to prep sports, plus two others who either edit, assign stories, occasionally write or compile high school statistics. And that doesn’t include the student interns and clerks who take high school scores on the phone.
The paper also covers high school sports in its many regional editions, stories that aren’t seen in the main newspaper but which are available on the paper’s Web site. In addition, there’s a page inside the sports section each Thursday given over entirely to prep features and short stories.
The paper’s new sports editor, Bill Bradley, has introduced a regular high school sports notebook and has pushed for more prep stories on The Bee’s front page and on the cover of the sports section.
In response to the deluge of high school games and their results, the sports section has put much of what was once in print – such as individual names – online.
Tom Negrete, assistant managing editor for sports and business and Bradley’s boss, is convinced there is no way to keep up with the growth without resorting to the Internet for things such as game statistics, team rosters and schedules.
“We can’t possibly keep up with the growth,” Negrete said. “We’ve had a problem for five years; we reluctantly give up anything. This is a big culture change for us.”
Whatever the paper does over the next few months as it evaluates its prep agate policy, I would make a few suggestions: Tell readers about the decision and the reasons why; blow up the agate page, start anew and be creative without regard to criticism from outside sports writers or editors (ignore the pressbox murmurs); remember who your readers are, what they want and why they turn to The Bee; the Internet is attractive but remember that not every family can afford a computer.
