So far, Packet/Gazette football coverage has achieved even keel

My former sports-department co-workers must be doing a pretty good job — it took seven weeks this season for someone to go over their heads and complain to me about coverage of high school football. I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of record.

The streak ended Saturday, though, when a Beaufort Gazette reader left a message ticking off the front-page headlines:

“Seahawks staggered by Cougars”

“Silver Bluff overpowers Ridgeland”

“Reigning champs blast Prep”

The caller noted a story about Beaufort High School’s narrow victory over James Island, which we picked up from The (Charleston) Post & Courier, was played on an inside page and that the section seemed skewed toward teams in Southern Beaufort County. Further, he asserted this seems to be a trend with the sports section.

Well, when you get right down to, this particular edition of the sports section DOES lean rather heavily south of the Broad River — two of three football stories on the front are about teams from southern Beaufort County, and the one traditional “Gazette team” represented was Ridgeland High School, which is located in a secondary coverage area.

However, the reader failed to note an important scheduling anomaly — for the first time all season, both Beaufort High School and Battery Creek High School played games outside our coverage area, games which we usually will attempt to pick up from other newspapers but which we seldom staff ourselves. These stories tend to play inside, primarily for logistical reasons — we’re not in constant communication with the writers, and it’s easier to scramble an inside page than a front cover if something falls through.

This coverage policy is decades old at the Gazette, and the Packet largely pulled back on out-of-town coverage, as well, about the time Hilton Head Christian Academy started a varsity program and Bluffton High School split off from Hilton Head Island High School, increasing the number of teams in the coverage area. Both newspapers now have five football schools each — three public and two private. As I’ve explained before, there are more football games than available staff members to cover them on any given Friday night. Giving first preference to staffing home games allows us to focus on games that were the biggest “community” events, and since our schools play roughly the same number of road games, we more or less even out coverage between schools automatically by following this policy.

Coverage became yet-more delicate after the newspapers’ sports departments merged in July 2008. I’ve discussed — ad nauseam by now — why the current economy made mergers of the Gazette and Packet editorial departments more or less imperative and how the mergers were meant to preserve as much coverage as possible in the face of staff reductions. To illustrate the point, since the fall of 2007, the last football season before the combination of the sports staffs and before the brunt of the recession, the total number of Friday night games covered by the Packet and Gazette has indeed fallen — to 23 games in the first seven weeks this year from 28 games in 2007. But that 18-percent drop in games covered by a staff writer is less than the 33-percent drop in sports department manpower.

As for the distribution of games played north of the Broad and south of the Broad, contrary to the caller’s perception, the sports department has done a good job of spreading the coverage around. Here are the numbers:

• Through seven weeks, a NOB high school football game story has led the Saturday newspaper four times, and a SOB game story has led four times. (Yes, that adds up to eight — the Beaufort High/Hilton Head High game in Week 2 led the section and counted for both sides of the river.)

• Both sides of the river have been represented on all seven sports fronts.

• A public school from both sides of the river has been represented on six of the seven weeks. The exception was Week 1, when there was no public SOB team — Hilton Head High didn’t play; Hardeeville and Bluffton met on a Saturday and were featured on the Sunday front.

• Excluding Hardeeville and Ridgeland — public schools outside the primary coverage area of our newspapers — a public school from both sides of the river has been featured on five fronts. Once exception is noted above. The second was this Saturday’s, when both Battery Creek and Beaufort High School played games in the Charleston area.

• There have been 25 “live” stories generated from games played on Friday night — 13 from games NOB and 12 from games SOB.

• Two of those stories were columns written by Justin Jarrett, who has twice been dispatched as a second reporter to important games — to the Beaufort High/Hilton Head High contest and to the Beaufort High/Fort Dorchester matchup.

So actually, if anything, coverage has skewed slightly toward NOB, which seems about right inasmuch as Beaufort High is the area’s best team and plays in South Carolina’s largest classification.

I explained all this to the caller when I returned his message, and after some reflection, he agreed.

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