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Mowery: AP all-state teams, rankings being rebranded, just a superficial change
As I sit on a Sunday afternoon, watching organized, NFL-brand youth flag football in a college-caliber high school field house, preparing for a week where all-state teams are announced, using my cell phone to provide WiFi … I realize that not only did the majority of these things exist when I first started all this, but that I probably wouldn’t have even recognized some of the terminology way back then.
No, we weren’t using typewriters when I started in journalism in the mid-1990s, but I didn’t have email on my office computer. We could access the Associated Press wire service on our desktops in the office, but nowhere else, and only one or two desks were connected to the Internet, through phone line modems. One was the “Leaf Desk,” where we’d have to go to grab photos. When we laid out pages, we’d have to print them out, and wax them down to page templates in the office, before a camera shot the image for the press’ plate.
When I started full time at the Midland Daily News, inheriting the duties as ‘poll chairman’ for the Associated Press’ Class C polls in football and girls basketball, I did most of my work by phone (land line, not cell), gathering the votes from my four voters, tallying things up on paper, then coding it on the one machine that could send things to the AP.
It was the same when I bounced around the state: to Alpena, Mt. Pleasant, then Oakland County — in both of my stints there.
Now, I can do most of that on this one machine on my lap. If I was adventurous, I could probably to the vast majority on my cell phone.
Things change, and that trend will continue this week, when the papers in the MediaNews Group Michigan cluster roll out all-state football teams selected by some of our writers, along with other members of the sports writing fraternity.
No longer will those be called ‘The Associated Press All-State’ teams, though.
Instead, they’ll be called the ‘Michigan Sports Writers All-State Football Teams.’
Same thing, essentially, just different names.
Yes, things change, but not all that much, in this case.
The process was still the same, with local sports writers gathering nominations from the coaches, filtering them regionally, then presenting them at the all-state meeting in Lansing last week, at the Michigan High School Athletic Association office. (Another thing that didn’t change: Still didn’t have enough plugs in the conference room. But I digress.)
The only thing that’s changing now is really just the name, allowing those teams to run in non-AP papers — a nod toward all the outlets owned by Gannett, which made a company-wide decision to not renew their contract with AP — and allowing those papers to have representatives on the committees. If those papers had been excluded from the process, we’d have had large gaps in our teams’ representation.
In our particular case, it also allows the teams to run in our non-AP customer papers, the weekly papers in St. Clair county, Dearborn and Downriver.
Bonus there, for us — and, in theory, for the customers of those papers.
They’ll roll out this week, starting with the 8-player football all-state teams, followed by Division 7/8, Division 5/6, Division 3/4 and Division 1/2.
The same reasoning will apply to the rankings, going forward.
We’ll have the same boys and girls basketball rankings throughout the winter — they’ll start after the turn of the calendar year — as we usually do, just slightly rebranded.
We’ll still vote on those — online, not by land line phone — and have them on all of our outlets’ web sites.
And then, after the dust and confetti settles at Breslin Center, we’ll have the all-state teams for boys and girls hoops, as well.
Those aren’t going away, just a little different.
Things change, but sometimes not all that much.
Now the only thing we need to do is get more plugs in the conference room, so I don’t have to bring along my “All-State Meeting Power Strips.” Those need to be rebranded, too.
Matthew B. Mowery is the regional sports editor for the MediaNews Group Michigan cluster, comprising four daily and three weekly publications, and has been an all-state voter since 1995. He can be reached at mmowery@medianewsgroup.com.
