Our Opinion

Good communities and good newspapers enjoy a symbiotic relationship. They feed off each other for mutual benefit. The paper recognizes its role as an institution within the community, a clearinghouse of information, a forum for discourse, a trumpeter of community achievement, a mirror and record of our lives. The community skillfully plays its role as advertiser, subscriber, contributor, correspondent, photographer.
As newspapers continue to reorganize their operations in a downturned economy, readers become even more critical to the success of their local community papers.
In the last few weeks, we’ve gotten a number of inquiries from interested parents wondering why there is no coverage of junior varsity sports in the paper. It’s a fair question. After all, the more names we can get in the paper, the better for us and you. Including JV sports would make the paper even more local, more comprehensive and better for all of us. We want it too. But we need your help.
Orange County High School fields 20 varsity teams and nine JV programs. It has grown to one of the largest AA schools in the state. Meanwhile, the Orange County Review has not.
Ideally, we’d have a full-time sports reporter who could compile reports from each team every week–varsity and JV–as well as write game stories and take photographs of all the best match-ups. Regrettably, those days are gone. We haven’t had a staff sports reporter for more than three years, nor a staff photographer for a year and a half.
Instead, we mostly rely on the goodwill of coaches and parents to call in scores and information so we can compile as comprehensive a sports report as we can each week. We track down coaches, scramble for scores and statistics, compile box score information and then write summaries of each week’s slate of games.
We’ve got to use the resources we have. We try to visit home meets, games and matches to get photos of our teams and athletes when they’re playing in Orange. (That explains why a photo one week may show a team in its home uniforms, even though we know they played away.) We recognize the importance of sports in our lives locally, but have to balance that against our other news responsibilities.
For the most part, we’re able to paint a pretty complete picture of each week’s varsity sports action. As former JV and varsity Hornets, we’d love to include JV. We simply don’t have the tools.
Here’s where you come in. A lot of the content in each week’s paper is contributed. Whether it’s a church announcement or coming event, a garden club report or a club photo, contributed copy helps guarantee our paper reflects who we are and what’s important to us. Readers send thse items in because they want to see them in the paper. So do we. JV sports can work the same way.
We’ve heard you. We want the same thing. Let’s work together to make it happen.