• The Green Phone was created so the fans could voice their
opinions. Give us a call and let us know what’s on your mind.
CALLER 1: I’m just calling about last week’s Green Phone
response about coach Clint Wheeler and the baseball team. I’m just
kind of confused.
• The Green Phone was created so the fans could voice their opinions. Give us a call and let us know what’s on your mind.
CALLER 1: I’m just calling about last week’s Green Phone response about coach Clint Wheeler and the baseball team. I’m just kind of confused. The way they made it sound in the response is that Gilroy lost players to maybe academics or something else. As far a I know, we only lost one to academics. We have the same roster for pitching so I’m just wondering what happened to all the other pitchers. That’s all. Just a question. Thanks.
GREEN PHONE: Caller 1, from what we understand, Gilroy’s pitching was hurt this season by a number of things, including – we have been told – a few cases of players who the coaching staff felt weren’t showing they wanted the ball, whether by not doing enough in practice or simply by taking an “end-of-the-year” attitude as the school year wound down. And Caller, we at Green Phone don’t claim to know how fair or unfair any of this might have been. We do know that coach’s “dog houses” have existed on every team at every level, and that coaches and others with a stake in a team often don’t see eye-to-eye on all kinds of things. In our opinion, Gilroy got about as far as it could this year with the team it had, and players, parents, coaches and boosters ought to be proud of the effort and accomplishments of the Mustangs.
CALLER 2: Hi, Green Phone. I am the mother of a Gilroy JV track person. Chris Jeske took second in discus Saturday in the TCAL Finals and he threw 104 feet. It wasn’t his best, but we had some really strong winds. And I know there were a few other kids: Carly Kennedy did the girls’ discus. Carly took sixth. We had Megan McAvoy who got first in the triple jump and she probably got first or second in the high jump, so she’s very good. And I know there’s Jamie Silva who runs and she took second place in the 400m and she also runs the 800m. Our discus and shot put kids are throwing without a coach because coach Rich Macy has been in the hospital. He had his hip replaced. So they’re doing all this without their coach. Thank you. Bye!
GREEN PHONE: Thanks for the info, Caller 2. Yes, there were some strong Gilroy JV performances at the TCAL Finals last Saturday. As a team, the JV girls took third. You mentioned sophomore Megan McAvoy. She actually won all three jumping events, reaching marks of 5-00.00 feet in high jump, 15-0.00 in long jump and 31-6.00 in triple jump. Sophomore Megan Litle also deserves some recognition. She took first in the 3200m run with a time of 13:27. Throwing coach Rich Macy’s absence makes the performances by Jeske, Bobby Best (1st in varsity discus, 2nd in shot put, CCS Trials qualifier) and Sierra Barroza (3rd in discus, CCS Trials qualifier) even more impressive. The Green Phone knows Macy is always right there at every meet, offering support to all the throwers as they compete. We wish him a healthy and speedy recovery and rehab.
CALLER 3: You printed a story Thursday about the Gilroy baseball team. You said that they “battled vainly against a superior Valley Christian team.” Gilroy lost 13-5. You say that their play was an inspiration and heartbreak of their hot–and–cold year. They had brilliance on the basepaths but a gaffe in baserunning, strong stretches of pitching with a meltdown in between. You treated them quite sympathetically, which I appreciate. What I noticed that you didn’t do, but what you have done in a lot of your stories in the past few months, is describe their loss as a “laugher.” In several of the headlines of your stories, you describe when a team wins by a large margin, “X team wins a laugher over Y team.” I’ve been on lots of teams before and when we’ve beaten a team by a large amount, it feels better to win. But when you lose by a large amount, I don’t ever remember laughing. I’d like to see you consider eliminating that term, the term “laugher,” from the headlines of our stories. When you lose by a large amount, I don’t remember laughing and when I beat another team or when my team beat another team by a large number of runs or a large score or a high score, if we laughed at them, that was considered unsportsmanlike conduct. Anyway, I enjoyed the story on the baseball. I would just consider that you treat other stories and other blowouts in a more respectful manner, as you did with this one.
GREEN PHONE: Caller 3, we’re glad you liked our coverage of the baseball team’s playoff loss on Wednesday to Valley Christian. We do take issue with your statement that the term “laugher” appears in “several of the headlines” of our stories. A search for “laugher” on the Gilroy Dispatch Web site (www.gilroydispatch.com) yields exactly two cases where the word was used in a headline. One describes a 26-0 softball score, the other a 49-14 football score. A few more links point to stories where “laugher” is used in the text of the article but not in the headline. Finally, there is a link to a letter to the editor that also takes us to task for the use of the not-so-funny word. Here’s the thing, Caller. Maybe we’re jaded, but the word “laugher” just doesn’t strike us as pejorative or to be taken as literally as you seem to think it should be. It’s just a sports word that describes a very lopsided score. Much like the term “squeaker” – which, incidentally, nobody ever seems to mind – it evokes a certain image of a game. One is a nail-biting affair, the other a chance for both teams to empty their benches in a contest decided early. (If Green Phone were a fourth-stringer on a team, we’d certainly hope to have a few laughers among the squeakers in the course of our season … otherwise, we’d never get a chance to play!) Lastly, like “squeaker,” the word “laugher” sometimes fits very well into the space for a headline. To reveal a bit of the sausage-making process, that’s often the main reason newspapers put the words they do in headlines … because they fit. Not to embarrass anybody.
