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There's more than football, basketball

by VANESSA STROBBE, C&J 371

Open any sports section of the Albuquerque Journal and on that front page, almost always you will find a headline on Lobo basketball or football.

Turn a few more pages, and you will find a “quick hit” on the University of New Mexico baseball, softball, tennis and a rare track or soccer blurb.

So, here’s my chicken or egg question: Does the media not cover what they’ve created to be “secondary” sports because people don’t care about them, or do people not care about these sports because the media doesn’t cover them?

To back off from targeting the Journal alone, each form of major medium in Albuquerque is guilty from broadcast to print. The trend is throughout, but why?
Could it be the programs’ success? With the exception of women’s basketball, which still gets less coverage than men’s basketball and football, the answer is a big “no.”

Men’s basketball and football reek of mediocrity, at best. On the court, the Lobos went 15-17 overall and an even more embarrassing 4-12 in conference last year. On the field, football posted a 6-7 record, numbers that fired other coaches across the country in programs that have higher expectations.

Speaking of programs with higher expectations and programs that undeniably produce better results, how about the university men’s soccer team or ski team?

Well, sure, soccer reached the national championship in 2005 and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament in 2006 for the fifth time in the last six seasons.

And hey, the ski team is the only team at UNM to ever win a national championship, and they’ve finished in the top-six at the NCAA Skiing Championships for the past nine years.

So apparently success is worth a two-inch blurb, while defeat and inadequacy shine in the spotlight like a nasty zit on the tip of a nose.

An alternative and equally futile excuse as to why the media in Albuquerque practically ignore sports other than football and basketball is popularity, or attendance.

First of all, the numbers announced at games stating the total attendance are skewed. Just because 14,000 tickets were sold to the game in no way means that 14,000 people attended the game. At a men’s basketball game last season, 14,000 looked a lot more like 4,000, especially as the losses kept stacking up.

And when it comes down to event awareness, the media is responsible for the attendance in the first place. Each game day, the Journal puts out a four-page spread for the football games. During basketball season, there is always an article previewing the game and publicizing the time and place of the event. So take a guess what is published before baseball, soccer, tennis, skiing and track events.

Not much.

The chicken had to lay the egg, but the egg had to hatch before there could be a chicken. You take your pick, but I say that people don’t know much, and hence don’t care much about the “secondary” sports simply because the media in Albuquerque makes these sports practically invisible and inaccessible

December 2, 2007

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