The Angry Basketball Fan

The high school basketball playoffs are in full swing and each game becomes bigger and bigger on the road to the state championships in Columbia. I thought I'd pass along this email from "Batik" and respond:

It's a shame that you missed a very good game between Lake City and Darlington in Lake City Tuesday night. I thought WPDE might actually cover this game, but then I reminded myself that neither school has "Myrtle Beach" in its name. I used to really like your sports segment, but now it's just a joke. I really hate the you ignore so many high school athletic programs just to serve Horry County. It makes one think that the Horry County School District is a majority owner of WPDE.

Batik

I just wanted to share with you our behind the scenes thinking on how we choose what games to cover during the post-season. First of all, I'll give you the rundown of games we covered during Tuesday night's 11pm sportscast:

1. Marlboro County at Myrtle Beach BOYS
2. Georgetown at Wilson BOYS
3. North Augusta at Carolina Forest GIRLS
4. Kingstree at Dillon GIRLS

If you are keeping score, that is 4 Pee Dee schools and 3 Beach schools (if you want to get technical, 2 from Horry County and 1 from Georgetown County). Batik's argument that we are showing only Horry County games doesn't hold much weight when you look at that lineup.
As for the Lake City/Darlington game, there's no question it was one of the better first round games on the board. Here's how we came to the decision to show the four games we did on Tuesday night. The first thing you have to look at is logistics. I anchor the 6pm and 7pm newscasts which means I can not get out of the parking lot until 7:30 pm. From our Conway studios, that limits me to what I can cover with the games tipping off at 7pm. Fortunately, I was able to get to Myrtle Beach High with 3:00 minutes to go in the 3rd quarter and stay until the 6:00 mark of the 4th quarter. With the Seahawks building a double digit lead, I made the call to try and get the end of the Carolina Forest girls game. I was lucky enough to get to the Forest with 2:20 to go in the 4th and a tie game. If Myrtle Beach and Marlboro was a closer game in the 4th, I would have probably stayed the distance and got the end of this game. The other equation is Mark Haggard. Hags has the flexibility of going further away. From January 15 to the end of the regular season, Hags and I are in an evaulation mode. We gather as much information as we can on area teams and begin to construct our watch list for our All-Hoop Zone teams. Our goal here is to get a list of about 20 players that we can narrow down to 15 and form our All-Hoop Zone team for both boys and girls. As we arrive in February, Hags and I begin to look at that list and determine which players we have video/highlights of. We then make it a priority to get highlights of the players on this list. With the first round of playoffs, we have covered about 90 percent of our list. One team that we did not have video of was the Kingstree girls so we made it a priority to grab them in the first round of the playoffs. Kingstree happened to be at Dillon in round one and then we simply looked at what other game we could get and the jaunt down Highway 95 to Wilson was logical.
Here's the irony. If the Kingstree girls were at home instead of on the road, Hags would have went to the Lake City game and paired it up with the Jaguar girls. Unfortunately, that couldn't happen. We've been able to show the Lake City boys three times this year and they are an outstanding team. It becomes a simple math problem: 34 teams boys and girls plus about a dozen SCISA squads. That's 80 teams we cover in boys and girls varsity basketball. We get 2:45 for sports every night. We try to maximize our time and resources. We appreciate the passion that all of our local sports fans have for their hometown team.
I appreciate Batik writing in and am always willing to explain why we make the choices we do when it comes to our sports coverage. We can't keep everyone happy all of the time. I hope that Lake City makes a deep run in the post-season and we can give them the coverage they deserve.