My son writes to Buster Posey

Last year, my son's favorite baseball player -- San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey -- was injured in a horrific home plate collision and missed more than half the season.

This year, Posey is trying to make a comeback, so Ian wrote a letter to encourage him. There's nothing more heartfelt than an earnest letter from a second grader, so here you go:

The text reads:

Dear Buster Posey,

I hope your leg is better.

Besides, how is your wife(?)

On April 15th, I'm going to come in at 9:30 a.m.

From, Ian

P.S. Hope you play well.

(Ian is noting that we will be visiting the ballpark, with other members of South San Francisco Youth Baseball, for a 9:30 meet and greet with some yet-to-be-determined Giants before that day's game with the Pirates.)

I love the kid's idea of small talk! "Besides, how is your wife?" Priceless.

What happened to media coverage of San Francisco prep sports?

Is the lack of preps coverage related to the lack of fans,
or is the lack of fans related to the lack of coverage?

As usual during the last 20 or so Septembers, I've been covering high school football for local newspapers the last couple weekends. This afternoon, I covered El Camino High's visit to Lincoln High, where the photo above was taken.

There once was a time were the San Francisco High School Championship would bring 50,000 people to Kezar Stadium, but there were probably as many people on the field Saturday as in the stands. While an estimated 500,000 people attended high school sporting events in 2009-2010, attendance is no doubt well down from its peak era.

Of course, it ultimately comes down to a waning interest in both participation and outside interest in high school sports due to the availability of other activities (e.g., video games and the freakin' Internet). One factor might be the relative lack of media coverage at "prep" sports today. I was the only person reporting today's game for a newspaper. A decade ago, the same game might have brought at least four print media reporters and a crew from a TV show such as "High School Sports Focus." Is the lack of media coverage of high school sports a symptom or a cause of low attendance?

Locally, I trace a lot of the decline in local media coverage to Hearst's acquisition of the Chronicle about 10 years back. Then, as now, the Chronicle had very little high school sports coverage. But the Hearst-owned Examiner had healthy preps coverage and did fairly well. So when the Examiner staff took over the Chronicle, one might have thought that Hearst would bring its coverage over there. Not the case. Prep coverage in the Chronicle is virtually nonexistent.

The Fang family, which owned the thrice-weekly Independent, which had a decent local sports section, took over the Examiner, and covered local sports well (at least until it came under Anschutz ownership). Of course, an eventual casualty of Fang ownership of the Examiner was the very existence of the Independent (the Fangs apparently couldn't afford to keep two papers going). So, over time, the city of San Francisco was left with minimal high school sports coverage.

But new technology is giving prep sports coverage hope. While the local sports pages of local papers like The San Mateo County Times has shrunken precipitously, other media have stepped in to take up some of the slack. The only other reporter at the game was from SanFranPreps.com, a local site started by a San Francisco State University graduate to cover local sports. In this, its second year, SanFranPreps has gotten successful enough it can start paying its writers, or so its editor told me last week. Over the past five years or so, MaxPreps.com has revolutionized the coverage and visibility of high school sports. Even the somewhat-maligned Patch.com from AOL has somewhat helped improve local sports coverage.

So, while the crowds are not at the games anymore, and the "traditional" media has almost abandoned prep coverage (and limited local coverage as a whole), new media offers a ray of hope -- albeit a slight one.

So do I get paid any extra?

One of the interesting things about the growing consolidation of the newspaper industry -- which is great for cutting costs in the industry but not so good for preserving a diversity of opinions -- is that reporters often finding themselves writing for papers they never would have worked with otherwise.

For example, last night I covered the Monterey/Half Moon Bay football game for the San Mateo Times. And, it turns out, the Monterey Herald -- yet another of the all-encompassing Media News syndicate that basically now controls all non-Hearst papers in the San Francisco Bay Area (and surroundings).

Thanks to my Times affiliation, I've had stories run in (relatively) local sister papers such as the Oakland Tribune and Palo Alto Daily News, but never have been syndicated as far as Monterey.

(When I was with the Glendale News-Press, I often got into the local sections of the Los Angeles Times before the News-Press was outright sucked into the LA Times after I left. And I'm not counting one-off stories I've done straight for papers like the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Visalia Times-Delta when their teams have come out here.)

The game itself was decent -- three weeks into the season and I haven't had a bad game yet. One thing of note was that in the San Mateo Times, my story -- heavily cut for space -- just led the weekly roundup of "minor" games. But in the Herald, my story ran complete as a stand alone.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when I submit my invoice to the paper, as stringers such as myself get one rate for "roundup" stories and another, slightly higher rate for "standalones." I will be charging the full standalone rate for last night's work and I'm hoping that they will honor the request, despite my officially being on assignment for the Times (where it ran in the shorter form).

It's all over but the equinox

It's still blazing hot, the days are still much longer than the nights and Fall technically doesn't start until Sept. 22, but summer's over for me.

Technically in the Bay Area (at least the north Peninsula), you can tell it's the end of summer when the weather actually begins to get warm. But for me, the traditional end of summer is the start of the high school football season. Last night, I covered my first game of the season for the San Mateo Times.

It was actually a decent kickoff for the gridiron season. Terra Nova scored a touchdown in the last 65 seconds to beat visiting Burlingame, 15-10. You can read my story online. (As an aside, whenever I have a game at Terra Nova, I have a ritual of eating my pre-game meal at the world's most awesome Taco Bell, literally built on stilts above the beach in Pacifica, near Ian's school).



The only disappointing thing was the new field at Terra Nova. There was a beautiful Field Turf carpet, but I think Terra Nova was one of the few fields around here that didn't need one. Unlike the ratty fields at, say, our local high school (which shall remain nameless), Terra Nova's had a well-drained, lush field of green grass -- which is what the game should be played on.

Sometimes I get a tad depressed that I'm again doing the same primary job (security) that I had 13 years ago, despite getting a pair of bachelor's degrees. I don't, however, have a problem writing about high school football year after year after year. Covering football is a tradition, one I've had every fall since 1992 (except 1996, 1998 and 1999 and not counting spectator attendances in 1987-1991 and 1995). The weird thing? I don't even really like football all that much -- at least above the high school level. But covering football takes me back to my (relatively) youthful days, when I thought I was either going to be the world's most dashing sports writer or foreign correspondent.

Or maybe walking the sidelines with high schoolers every Friday night just helps me forget that I'll be 40 in three years.