Keeping an up-to-date contact list of high school coaches in Wisconsin is always a tough job.
The turnover rate in head coach turnover in softball is one of if not the largest of all the WIAA sports. Trying to keep it current is tough and compounded by the fact that the WIAA School Directory is never complete nor up to date.
That is not the fault of the staff in the WIAA office though. The fault lies with the athletic directors at the WIAA schools. It's their job to keep the directory up to date.
There are a couple of issue I constantly encounter, 1) Schools that I know have a softball team do not even have softball listed on their list of sports on their school page of the WIAA Directory. 2) The name of the former coach is still the one listed on the Softball line of the school page on the Directory. When I find one of those things missing I always contact that school's athletic director to point out the lack of information on that schook's page.
So the first 2021 Letter to Head Coaches went out tonight. Here is a copy of it.
Hello To All Head Coaches in the State of Wisconsin
Finally! A high school season has officially started. The loss of a full season was tough for everyone.
I’m contacting all of you for several reasons. You may have heard that I have stepped away from the Poynette High School softball season after 41 years as the head coach. COVID issues were the reason. However, I have not stepped away from the game of fastpitch softball.
For the past 20 years the Fastpitch Chronicle website has been a lifeline to hundreds of coaches, thousands of players and fans. It will continue to be so as we have plans for expanding the coverage and offering more things for people who enjoy our great game as much as we do here.
The Fastpitch Chronicle is the only media outlet in the state that allows you to promote your program, your team and your players on a statewide basis without having to bounce around to a dozen media websites or more to find results. The Fastpitch Chronicle offers you the opportunity to promote your team and its players in any manner you choose.
Take a look at the recent news articles on the website at fastpitchchronicle.net. Those team previews were submitted by staff members of the teams who have their pre-season profile’s published. You can do the same. There is a questionnaire on the Documents tab under the Resource Heading on the website. You can use the questions there to write up a preview similar to the one that came from Monore and Berlin. Do not answer the questions on the form and send it back to me because I do not have time to write all those articles. Here is my pledge to all of you. If you send me the written articles I will publish them. That’s always been the promise on this end.
During the season you or an assistant or somebody close to the program you can submit game stories and I will publish them. You could also send me links to results that are posted or published by other media outlets and I will simply post the link. It’s really up to you as to how much news you want to generate about your program.
You’ve now had two days of official season practices so think about whether or not you want people to read about your players successes.
Also take a look at the awards that you can generate from the Documents page.
I look forward to serving the Wisconsin High School fastpitch scene more than we ever had. That will be an easy task if coaches take the time to simply promote their own program.
I come from a time soon after Title IX was passed (June 23, 1973). I well remember the early days of high school fastpitch in this state. I lived it. There were no preseason questionnaires from newspapers to get pre-season profiles. There were not even any scores posted in daily newspapers when at the same time baseball teams got full box scores. The coaches from that era battled hard to get any kind of publicity or notoriety. We kept on plugging away and finally started to get something that looked like this:
Softball
Bug Tussle 21, Hooterville 19
That was it. However, we kept pushing to get to where we are today but we can get farther. We can get better at promotion.
The email address to send your articles, pictures etc is faspich1@gmail.com
I urge you all to also take advantage of the wissports website where you can upload your statistics. I understand the entire thought process about statistics but for those of you who wish to use a great stat program wissports is there for you. I believe you can even upload the Gamechanger information to the wissports site (More on that tomorrow).
I am not going to bombard your inbox with lots of emails but it would be great to have mine bombarded by all of you.
Have a great first week of practice. I know many of you will react to this offer with submissions.
Just keep this in mind -- the media is not going to go out of their way to seek you out. You need to seek them out. That’s the way it has always been and it will not change as time moves on.
Keep it Rising
Bob Tomlinson
That's the invitation to submit articles, stories, links etc. It will be interesting to see the responses.
Have a great day and an even greater tomorrow and as always --
Keep it Rising!
Bob
