Give our kids the recognition they deserve

2/12/2008

If you want to see how your kid's, neighbor's, friend's, nephew's or grandchild's high school sports team did in Novi yesterday, you might have a difficult time. Oddly, for all the openness and availability of information from our city and schools, Novi High School Athletics is one area where it's difficult at best to find out what's going on.

It's pretty simple. Check the daily Detroit Free Press, News or Oakland Press and you'll see sports results for most schools - except Novi. And unless we pay someone to bring us results, we can't get them either.

Folks, something doesn't seem right here.

We've been observing this for a while now, and the situation seems to be getting worse. Sure, some high-profile teams like basketball and football are in the press on a fairly regular basis. But dozens of other teams are not consistently given the recognition they deserve, and when they are in the press it's very brief. Often times, it's the other team who's providing those results to the press. That's why most Novi teams only get some inconsistent coverage in the regional press.

It costs nothing to have a team assign someone, usually a parent, to communicate the results to local media. And the whole process is pretty quick. Every major news organization has a means to accept high schools sports results, making it easy to report the results so they appear in the next day's paper. Neither they nor we have the resources to get someone to cover every high school event everywhere. That's why there are systems in place to accept results from the schools directly.

Such coverage not only gives the kids the recognition they deserve, but it also helps to sell our schools. And in these times of budget cut-backs, even schools are competing against one another for kids, and therefore education dollars. Sports results provide free advertising for our schools that in the long-term can only help.

We the People are consistently pleased and proud of our Wildcat student-athletes, their coaches and supporters, and the results show. However, we are consistently displeased with the lack of coverage and recognition the kids are getting in the press.

Let's give our Wildcats the recognition they deserve on a timely and regular basis. When we can see how the kids are doing in the regional press, we'll be pleased and the rest of the region will know how well our Wildcats are doing too.