Editor's Response

Here is what I heard back fro the Sports Editor of our local paper via email yesterday, following my letter--emailed--to him.

I first want to thank you for taking the time to send us such a carefully thought out email to discuss your point of view. I'm sure it required quite a bit of effort on your part as you attempted to express your disappointment in the lack of coverage for the swimming teams.

By way of response, let me assure you that I too am disappointed that we were unable to have a reporter at the event or at least have the results published in our paper. I sincerely appreciate all of the high school athletes and recognize that it requires incredible dedication and effort to be successful at any level. My goal as the sports editor (and as a former high school sports reporter) is to attempt to provide the most complete and exceptional high school athletics coverage possible.

There are, as you know, always scheduling issues to resolved as we attempt to utilize our few resources to appropriately represent what happens in Utah Valley. With schools belonging to at least six regions that include all five different classifications, it's a constant struggle.

I do, however, endeavor to make sure we get whatever we can from each event, particular region and state competitions. The problem in this case was that I wasn't aware of where or when the Region 4 swimming meet (or the swimming meets for any of the regions) was taking place. We rely on our network of coaches and athletic directors to make sure we have complete schedules but this particular meet was never brought to my attention.

As I'm sure you've seen, we also get a variety of results from coaches and parents that provide information on events we are not able to personally attend. In this case, however, none of the swimming results were called in or emailed to us, so we had no knowledge about what had taken place. If those had been received, we certainly would've gotten them both in the paper and onto our high school sports Web site.

With the upcoming state swimming meets taking place both this weekend and next, we are planning to have articles and coverage for every event. I hope your daughter qualified to compete there because it really is a great event to participate in.

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to call me so we can discuss the matter further.

Again, thank you for your time and your enthusiasm for high school athletics.

J. L.
Daily Herald Sports Editor