ELItorial

What Yale journalists owe Yale athletes

You can lose friends fast being a sports editor on this campus. "You do what?" she asks, previously interested, but now remembering the less-than-glowing analyses we ran of her last game. "Oh. That's nice. I'm gonna go grab another beer." Obligatory frown. "Nice meeting you."

JULIA TIERNAN/YH The womenÕs hockey team isnÕt having a great year, but whatÕs a writer to say?

And that's just in person. I could do an hour-long Andy Rooney segment on the all the hate mail we get. Let's just say some athletes and alumni tend to get a little pissed off by critical coverage.Name any team, and it's unhappy about the quality and quantity of our coverage of it. Real anger is often reserved for the ears of teammates—go to Commons and eavesdrop on a table of athletes reading an article about their sport. It's intense.

This is no Arab-Israeli conflict, and the hatred may not be quite as bitter as that of actors and directors whose plays get bombed, but it's still high time athletes and journalists had an open and honest dialogue about Yale sports coverage. Understanding where the other is coming from, of course, would be a good place to start.

Look at the issue from the athletes' angle. Tennis star Andrea Goldberg, TD '02, wrote last year in a letter to the Yale Daily News, "It seems like a slap in the face, then, for people who turned down a full ride to another school (where they probably would have gotten more respect from the school newspaper) to be ripped on continuously by the staff of their own university paper." Goldberg pointed out, accurately, that sports headlines skew the article. Field hockey can't just "lose" to someone—they have to get "pelted."

Goldberg's complaint is obviously valid. Athletes have it rough, and to them, it looks like we journalists have it easy. There's a formula—make a few phone calls, jot down some clichés, work in an optimistic closing paragraph and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, you've got your standard team story. So given that they're the ones doing it and we're merely reporting it from our armchairs, we should always be respectful, right? Yes.

But. There is the other side to the story. We've stepped into the athletes' studly cleats; now let's try those geeky journalists' loafers. This sounds like a phrase from Revenge of the Nerds, but we're people, too. We're student-journalists, just as athletes are student-athletes. We too have to balance classes and time-consuming extracurriculars. We're just trying to do our job when athletes breathe down our neck, searching like crazed hyenas for typos, misspellings, slight misquotes, and are always extra-sensitive to anything in the same county as criticism.

Problem one is that athletes don't trust the media. It's not easy to write a good story when a losing team just spouts the same clichés. "We need to score more," or "our defense needs to play an entire game." What are we supposed to get out of that? If athletes stopped talking down to student-journalists or looking at them as if they were from another planet, maybe they would find the quality of articles about their sports improving. This is not the case, of course, with all teams. Some go out of their way to talk, to give good, substantive quotes, and to let the student-journalists see what their team is genuinely all about.

Problem two is that most teams are overly sensitive to criticism. I had to explain over and over to a writer last year that one team was upset about what it felt to be excessively negative criticism. " They lost," he kept saying when I tried to get him to understand. "They lost big-time. What do they want me to do—say it's okay because they tried hard?" The reporter may have been a bit too blunt, but his sentiments are reasonable. We want to be—and have to be, if you believe in journalistic ethics and all that jazz—honest. If it walks like a duck, and talks like duck, then guess what? The women's hockey team really is 1-9 and has one Ivy League win in 12 years—that's not very good. Thanks to Rumpus' "Remedial Media," we know what criticism feels like, and it hurts. But if it's fair, it should be used constructively.

Finally, to all the under-covered teams, please understand that space is scarce. Sport X may be more interesting, or ranked higher nationally, but football is football. The Yale athletic department spent $386,000 on football last year—more than twice what it spent on any other sport. Journalists do have an obligation to give all Yale athletes, regardless of sport, sex, or national ranking, fair and timely coverage. Club sports especially deserve much more coverage than they get. And though we try, they should be understanding when reporters aren't breaking into their rooms to get exclusive interviews.

Next time some weasely-voiced reporter calls or forgets to call, please be patient. He or she may be a freshman and may not know all the rules of your sport, but complaining only makes it worse. Good, solid articles come not from being aloof, but from taking the time to answer the reporter's questions and not hiding behind a prepared speech or a set of clichés.

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