All Roads Lead To Lakeland, Again

Sitting under a pile of rosters, stats, and newspaper articles at my desk today, preparing for a second weekend of the Florida High School Athletic Association's basketball state championship games in Lakeland. You haven't lived until you've tried to come up with background information on a school with 219 students in grades pre-K through 12 (The Rock School, Gainesville. Class 1A finalist for the boys).

Anyway, Mike Bianchi's column on Dick Vitale's "gaffe" during a Knoxville radio interview reminded me of a brief exchange last week during the girls' finals between Sun Sports analyst Mark Wise and the head coach of an eventual state champion, who will remain nameless for reasons about to be explained.

Before every state championship game, Mark and I corral each head coach for a ten-minute chat. Like every production meeting between coaches and announcers in every televised sport in America, the goal is pretty simple: the play-by-play guy (in this case, me) needs correct pronounciations of the players' names and any relevant background info on the school that might be useful during the broadcast. The analyst (Mark) is looking for X's and O's -- what kind of defense will you be using, who's the one player on the other roster that concerns you, matchups, etc. It's terribly benign.

Yet, one of the head coaches -- again, who would end up winning a state title a couple of hours later -- flinched when Mark asked her what type of offense she'd be running. She froze a smile on her face and said, "we haven't decided yet."

This is one hour before the state championship game. Are we complete idiots? Do you honestly expect us to believe that you haven't had a game plan in place since last October? What's the issue here?

Mark gamely pressed on with his questions, gathering information, but he was pretty steamed afterwards. There's no reason for a coach to hold back. Considering that these games are tape-delayed on Sun Sports, and therefore won't be seen for at least a week, there's no possibility of giving anything away. It's not like the opposing team can run a cable from our production truck to a monitor hidden underneath their bench. It was a ludicrous case of a coach playing it waaaay too close to the vest, without cause.

I thought about it afterwards, and here's my conclusion: some coaches get it, and some don't. Television is going to win. We have the last word; we're the ones who present the storylines of the game to the viewer. The coaches who get it will understand this and use it to their advantage, singing the praises of a kid who needs a little recruiting attention, or perhaps selling the merits of their school to the audiences of Florida. The ones who get it will welcome us in, act as if they're bringing us behind the velvet ropes, even if they're really not telling us anything that the opposing coach doesn't already know. If they do that, Mark and I will leave with a positive impression, and that will come across on the broadcast. If they don't, we won't kill them on the air -- we're professionals, people -- but we'll have far less background with which to work, which does the school, its players, and the coach herself a disservice.

TV is going to win. We're wearing microphones, and the coaches are not. Some get it, and some don't.

Connection to the Vitale story? As Bianchi points out, "In his zeal to be beloved, Dickie V. won't tell us what he really thinks for fear of offending someone." So many fans insist that television network announcers bring biases to the broadcast; the truth is, most fans -- and announcers -- just want the truth. It's too bad that Vitale felt he had to apologize for unwittingly giving an honest opinion on a radio show. And as an aside, could you really argue with Vitale -- or with Billy Donovan, who claims he never said it in the first place -- for thinking that Al Horford's stock is higher than Joakim Noah's right now?

I mean, it is. So what? Is that offensive? It's not like Noah won't make it in the NBA. He will, and so will Horford. Horford is simply playing better at the moment. Is that groundbreaking or controversial, or simply an observation?

Off to Lakeland tomorrow. Six games in two days, for a grand total of twelve state championship games over the course of one week. See you on TV.