For those that follow the Raiders and varsity high school sports more actively by looking for information online, you are likely familiar with the changes this year to what used to be the Star Tribune’s Sports Hub. The Star Tribune Sports Hub was the resource chosen by the Minnesota State High School League as an official way to distribute results and statistics for several of the major high school varsity sports. That website underwent a major revamp and is now called “Strib Varsity”.
Twelve different varsity sports are set up on the new website. Fall has football, boy’s and girl’s soccer and girls volleyball. Winter has boy’s and girl’s basketball along with boy’s and girl’s hockey, and spring has baseball, softball, and boy’s and girl’s lacrosse. Four sports for each season.
The old website was a wealth of data for sports nerds and writers, and teams were well versed in how to load data to the site. With the change this year there has been a major lack of data during much of the fall sports season. In fact, the data was so terrible for both soccer teams, I stopped going there for data which truly made writing soccer stories extremely difficult and thus, the stories lacked the normal depth I work diligently to provide to our readers.
The hope is still there that things will change for winter sports, but so far, the data is non-existent. This will present challenges for telling stories for yet another season. Small papers like The Journal simply do not have the resources to have a dedicated photographer and a dedicated note taker for every game, especially when there are a total of 11 different teams to cover in six days.
This is where the “it takes a village” mentality needs to kick in. Thankfully, for home basketball games, we have Dick Cragg who takes amazing stats, but he does not always get to away games. Nordic and Alpine skiing teams both use different systems for reporting, and the head coaches are great at responding to questions each week. Wrestling has officially split into two different teams this year with the girls having some of their own meets. The team managers have done a great job documenting previous years on social media, so hopefully those scores continue to be put out there.
My passion for telling the stories of the dance team has been shared numerous times because my daughter was a dancer for her high school career and coach Kayla Sohn along with her assistant coaches fully understand and support that passion for telling you the stories about the second largest high school sport in the State of Minnesota.
That leaves boys swimming, gymnastics, and both boy’s and girl’s hockey. Four teams of eleven. Sure, two teams are more of a niche sport like dance, but I treat those sports the same as I do football, those athletes deserve their stories told the same as the rest.
So, why this long explanation? Well, because I need to make sure, I get out in front of this issue both for understanding and for assistance. I can only tell the stories that I have information on. This week’s girl’s hockey is a great example. I have the varsity roster and the two scores of the two games they played, that is it. There is literally zero data available online. No shots on goal, no penalty minutes, no scoring summary, nothing. Look back at my hockey stories from last year, see the suspense built, the crafting of how the game went. Stats for me, scoring summaries for me all trigger mental notes I make while taking 800 pictures of the action. Maybe it is a limitation of my own abilities, maybe I focus too much taking the extra photos and should focus more on getting a couple photos while also taking notes, but if I am not staring down the eyepiece of my camera, I am afraid I am going to miss getting that ESPN like top five play of the day photo that I quite often capture. The behind the back save that makes an NHL goalie blush.
Now, I do not have an answer as to why this data is not there. Continuing with the girl’s hockey example, I looked through all the games played by Simley, South St. Paul, Hastings, Eagan and Gentry Academy and everyone of those games had the same exact information available. The two teams that played, the date, location and the score, that is it.
My suspicion is that the new site is simply not capable of handling the data yet, and that is going to make this even more of a challenge.
What can you, the reader, do to help this situation. Understand that I am working on alternative ways to get the data. A big piece that would help would be to give these coaches some student managers to help with the data collection and submission. If you have a kid that loves sports but simply does not want to be on the active roster, encourage them to be a manager. If the coaches can focus on coaching the teams and the managers help with some of the administrative side of things, especially the post-game reporting of the scores, especially on nights I have to go to four games in one evening, then we get the data needed to tell the in depth stories you are used to while minimizing the stress on the coaches.
If you are a parent of a varsity player and want to help communicate some stats for the team, let’s talk! It is a great way to give back to the community and can strengthen that bond with your kid. That is how I ended up announcing swimming for Two Rivers for nearly a decade, something I really enjoyed.
The bottom line here is simple. I will do my best to tell the stories I can based on the information I have access too. If the only thing I have when I sit down to write a story is the score of the game, that does not make for exciting journalism, and it certainly does not give you the stories that you deserve to read and the stories these kids deserve to have told about them. If the data is not available, something in our coverage will need to change, and I would hate to have to sacrifice covering one or more sports completely so that I can stay at another for the entirety of the game.
Here is to hoping that access to data changes quickly so we can continue to give you the stories you want and deserve, until then, thank you for understanding the frustrations on our end and for your patience.