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tomtimmermann

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  1. As I've said pretty much from Day 1, SLU is way better off in the A-10. Better league, better cities, better visibility. Do you want to be going to Cedar Falls, Peoria and Des Moines or Philadelphia, Washington and New York? And that's just on the basketball front. From an alumni perspective, SLU has more grads in New York than in every MVC city combined. If you want to get your brand out, the A-10 is the way to go. And I think you have to take the 12-13 team. Ellis and Jett coming off the bench? That's quality depth.
  2. An "at" or a hyphen instead of the comma in UCLA's written-out name is one of the more common things you see. Though most maddening is the New York Times' style, which renders the school as U.C.L.A. But I don't write letters to the editor about it and just resign myself to the moral superiority of knowing how it really should be. Within the A-10, SLU and SJU want Saint spelled out, but Bonaventure goes with St., no doubt thinking that Saint Bonaventure would be too many letters.
  3. The SLU locker room is closed after games, except in the NCAA and A-10 tournaments, as required by rules. And NCAA rules require that, except for players who go into the interview room, players have to be in the locker room for a specified time after the game. So after, say, the Louisville loss, they were as down as you would expect, but cooperative. During the season, at Chaifetz, two or three players are brought into the interview room and sit at a table and answer questions. This format obviously limits how many people you can talk to, keeps you from getting anything that isn't shared with everybody on hand, and slightly alters the dynamic by putting a table and a microphone in the equation, rather than having a more informal conversation. But that's probably how 90 percent of schools do it nowadays. Late in the game, the media (OK, me) will be asked who they want in the room after the game. Ninety or 95 percent of the time that person will show up. Every now and then, someone (OK, usually the same guy) would duck out and evade the PR staff or be unavailable for other reasons. On the road, I usually hang out in front of the locker room door and grab guys as they come out. When Brad Soderberg coached the team, I would go into West Pine Gym about a half hour before practice, sit down in the front row of the bleachers, and wait for people to come in. Soderberg would come over every day and we'd talk. Then players would start coming in, and if I needed someone, I'd give them a wave and they'd come over and talk. I can remember a time or two when Soderberg delayed the start of practice while I finished up an interview. That situation was great because sometimes, you want to talk to one person about something that happened in a game, but he didn't do enough otherwise to warrant coming into the interview room. So this format was great. When Majerus became coach, that changed. Practices were closed and there was no access to players or Rick before practice. All interviews were done afterwards, though when practice ended about 6 p.m., most players just wanted to leave and get something to eat. So if you wanted to talk to more than one person, good luck. (He slightly let up on that in his final season.) Majerus would send assistant coaches out to do postgame on road trips because the set up there required him to walk back out to courtside to do the interview, and he didn't want to do that. (He didn't want to do it at SLU either, which is why they had to wire a microphone into the locker room oarea.) Majerus never once failed to talk to me after a game, though, as you've probably heard the audio, there were some games where he didn't really want to talk or wouldn't say much once he got there. (Fun times.) Also, in the years Majerus was coach, he didn't answer or return my phone calls just twice, which, having talked to other writers around the A-10, is an amazing success rate. Again, a lot of times he didn't want to talk and couldn't wait to get off the phone with me, but he always called me back. With Crews in charge, we do interviews before practice again, which is good -- TV had a hard time covering SLU during the Majerus Era because they don't have camera units or reporters free at 6 p.m. Crews also gives better answers. Majerus' postgame sessions had a stream of consciousness quality and he was great for not finishing thoughts. You'd have the first two-third of what seemed like it was going to be a great quote, but he wouldn't finish the sentence. Pretty much all of SLU's assistant coaches have been great to work with. I think everyone around the team would agree that Chris Harriman was the best. So if I had to rank, I'd say it was best under Soderberg, second-best under Crews, third-best under Majerus. Though the Soderberg level of access is pretty much unheard of at any mid-sized program or higher anymore.
  4. Yes, though international also encompasses other factors, like length of runway and ability to process customs if needed. It's much the same way there are interstate highways in Hawaii. These are things copy editors worry about.
  5. As a guy who at one point was in charge of the sports copy desk, protecting the company line was part of my job. However, under my stint, I did get them to change how we referred to Southwest Missouri State, going from SMSU to SMS, which the school preferred. And then they changed the name of the whole university, rendering the point moot. I once knew the story of why we let Lake Saint Louis be Lake Saint Louis, but I've forgotten it. There was a movement a few years back to stop calling the airport Lambert Field, but I think it failed. By calling the school St. Louis instead of Saint Louis, it allowed me to fit two more characters into each story. You may have noticed I also saved space by never referring to Mike McCall as Mike McCall Jr.
  6. The Post-Dispatch breaks from AP style on certain occasions. One of them is this. Whenever St. Louis appears in the paper, it is St. Louis. It could be the St. Louis Galleria, St. Louis Tool and Dye, St. Louis Plumbing. It is never Saint Louis. It does not matter how the entity chooses to spell it itself. Among the reasons for doing this is consistency. Off the top of your head, is it the Saint Louis Galleria or the St. Louis Galleria? A great many things we write about at the paper involve entities with St. Louis in the name. This saves us the problem of having to look up, particularly on deadline, what some company's preference is. If there was a company called St. Louis Hydrogen and Other Highly Explosive Materials that blew up at 11 p.m., one of the last things the news desk wants to be doing on deadline is going online to find out whether it's St. Louis or Saint Louis. And if you call it St. Louis the first day, and then find out they prefer Saint Louis, you then have to go into the archives and change every reference so that 20 years from now, when Tim O'Neil does a retrospective on the giant explosion at St. Louis Hydrogen and Other Highly Explosive Materials, everything is in one place. If the St. Louis Zoo decided tomorrow that it was the Saint Louis Zoo, that's a lot of changes to make. We have gotten letters and phone calls from Fr. Biondi on down, and the answer is the same: That's our style. We treat St. Louis University the same way we treat every other entity in St. Louis with St. Louis in its name. When I'm doing a freelance assignment that involves SLU, I'll write it out as Saint Louis University. So I know how to do it. But in the Post-Dispatch, that's it. While letters to the sports editor aren't my department, I think they are literally letters to the editor, not emails to the editor or comments on Bernie's blog. As such, we don't get many.
  7. Answered in reverse order: I regularly see Frank at Cardinals games, usually waiting outside the visiting clubhouse when I'm doing sidebars. He's gathering sound for his station or someone else. I don't know that you can do much to keep the coverage the way it is other than reading it. For years, we never knew who read what in the paper. Now, we can look and see just how many readers on each story. But don't cancel your subscription just to read it online. Do both. Ultimately, what will keep the coverage of the team high is the team doing well. If the team is 12-18 and they're getting 6,000 people a night at Chaifetz, they're going to look at whether sending a reporter on the road is a cost-effective thing to do. (And if you write letters to the editor, don't be indignant and call us names or accuse us of malfeasance. We're a sensitive bunch.) As to what SLU could do better or what SLU does better than others, there are all sorts of things. The best atmosphere in the league, hands down, is at VCU. The place is full, the band gets everybody going, and when coupled with the team's style of play, the situation is intense. VCU and Dayton are probably the A-10 facilities with the biggest home-court advantages. (VCU may be good for four or five points.) SLU is probably third-best in the league. But I don't know how you can match that. VCU and Dayton are cities with no pro sports. They're the biggest things in town. Many of the alumni stay there after they graduate. SLU's facilities are better than anyone in the league's. Now that SLU routinely charters to away games, that's a plus. If you're only looking at the basketball side of it, I think what SLU has to offer is comparable to anyone in the league. But what would it take to make SLU into, say, Xavier? If you could get the best players in town to stay here, that would be a big step. You don't have to get every Bradley Beal, but if you could get one out of every three, that would be big. But it's tough. Let's face it: If Duke or Florida or UCLA comes knocking on your door, you have to like St. Louis (the city and the school) an awful lot to stay around. Consistently getting to the NCAA Tournament would be big, so you don't have to constantly reinvent the wheel. One of the problems with private schools is that they can keep coaches contract information under wraps. At Mizzou, Dave Matter puts in a request and the school has to give him a copy of the contract. SLU is mum on the topic. The standard for a coach is four or five years. The fact that SLU is staying mum on the topic makes you wonder if it's something less. (It's certainly not more.) If I knew, I'd tell you. When keeping play by play during a game, I would refer to players by initials, so I have no problem with it. (On the hockey beat, they use players numbers.) However, I'm usually referred to as T-squared rather than TT.
  8. I think the soccer team should be good. Lots of players back from last season. Alex Sweetin is the most significant loss. There are some promising freshmen from overseas. (Watch Patrick Sarr, a defender/midfielder from Senegal, though he needs to add some size.) SLU's schedule has good, but not great teams, though that can change. I think if they can go 7-2 in nonconference play, their RPI should put them in good position to get in the NCAAs whether or not they win the A-10 championship. Last year, they had what they thought would be a good win against Creighton, and it didn't work out that way, and their inability to win a nonconference game on the road really hurt them. I don't think they're national championship good, but I think they're good enough to get in the tournament and win a game or two. It almost always seems to come down to whether team can score goals. Multiple options in goal.
  9. I saw four of the freshmen -- everyone but Roby and Jolly -- in a practice session, but they were working half-court sets at half-speed as they were learning the offense, so it's hard to rate anybody. The veterans who have played open gym games with all of them didn't single anyone out other than to say that Roby and Jolly, because they had been there longer, were slightly ahead of the game. By the time the season comes around, that edge will be gone. The expansion trail seems quiet. The Big East spent its first season getting its act together after its very rushed start and they were too busy thinking about other things besides expansion. Once they get the second season off to a more orderly start, there figures to be some discussion, but everyone seemed pretty content with 10 teams last season. If the league does decide to expand, I think SLU would remain an attractive commodity because of the size of the TV market compared to the competition. As Jack Kent Cooke used to say, expansion is as inevitable as tomorrow but not quite as imminent.
  10. Joe speaks the truth. I'll add that I answered every email I got from readers asking questions. I didn't get many. As long as I'm here, any other questions?
  11. There was more or less a schedule set up. If SLU had a game on Wednesday and Saturday during a week, I'd do either a story or a small preview box to run the day of the game and then cover the game. Since my schedule was limited to five days a week so as to not pay overtime or accrue comp days, that left just one other day during the week I was supposed to be working. Sometimes that fifth day was spent traveling -- if I was in an East Coast city that didn't have direct service to St. Louis, that could be a six-hour or more project -- sometimes it was spent in the office on an evening copy desk shift, sometimes it was spent covering something else. There were very few times when I didn't do a story on the day of a game, and if I did one of our small preview boxes, it was usually because of a lack of space in the paper and I was told not to write. (There might be some times when the bosses would look at the schedule and see they had a gap on another day and we'd move something to a different day.) So basically, four stories a week is what you're going to get. Space is tight in the paper nowadays, and usually the only loose period during the basketball season is the gap between the end of the Rams season and the start of Cardinals spring training, when you just have the Blues, Mizzou and SLU. During the offseason, my time is pretty much spoken for between the office and the Cardinals. But in-season, if I were to suggest a story on a day that wasn't part of the schedule, it would be a space and schedule dependent situation, and often the space wasn't there.
  12. I never got the impression anyone read this board. If they did, it would correlate inversely to their position in the program (i.e. if anyone did it was the team managers). You could never get consistent answers from players as to what they looked at. They obviously were online a lot, and they seemed to know if they were dissed, but if asked would say they didn't read anything. It's possible they were being informed of things by others or saw headlines but didn't read stories. Majerus always said he never read my stories, though he did compliment me on the one right before he won his 500th game. (Though, again, it's very possible someone said, 'Hey, you should read this story,' and he did.) That story, by the way, was an unexpected one because I figured he wouldn't want to talk about himself, but for some reason on that day, he did, and we probably had one of our longest conversations after I asked him about 500 wins. As for plus-minus, SLU's game-stat program now figures plus-minus, so they can get it if they want, along with the plus-minus for every five-man on-court combination. (I never used that, other than for amusement purposes, because the sample size was so small and the variances so high.) I think for the coaching staff, which is breaking the game down at a whole different level, plus-minus would reinforce what they saw. I once asked Crews if there were specific stats he looked at and he said No. Soderberg was very big on points-per-possession. In team meetings the day after games, one of the first things he would tell the team was what the PPP was from the night before. Back when people said SLU should be in the Valley rather than the A-10, I never understood that. I went to New York every other year, Philadelphia every year (sometimes three times), Pittsburgh and Washington. Compared to the Valley cities (Des Moines? Cedar Falls?) or even the places Mizzou and Illinois go, that was a pretty nice itinerary. The Big East would have been even better. Nothing but big cities there.
  13. The 2000 C-USA tournament is certainly a memorable moment. (Though this may sound too much like Life on the Road for some.) The tournament ran from Wednesday to Saturday, and my wife had to leave St. Louis on Friday afternoon for a conference in New York. Our daughter was coming up on her first birthday, and my wife was insistent we make plans for what we would do if we were both out of town on the weekend. I told her not to sweat it, because even if SLU won its first game on Wednesday, it would be playing Cincinnati on Thursday and there was no way SLU was winning that game, having just lost to the Bearcats by 43 the week before. I would be home Thursday night, Friday morning at the latest. No problem. As readers of this forum know, that didn't work out as I'd expected. With no relatives in St. Louis, our infant daughter got passed around the greater St. Louis area for the weekend from babysitters to work colleagues, to whoever had some spare time or a crib. What was turning into a major story was also becoming a major nightmare. Then after SLU won the thing on Saturday, after everyone had cut down their piece of the net, there was still one left and Lorenzo Romar, who was atop the ladder and had done the next-to-last one, looked down at me and said, "Tom, would you like to do the last one." Needless to say, I passed. (However, I did accept a ride home on SLU's charter to get home a few hours earlier.) That was a pretty wild week.
  14. Listing newspapers that travel with A-10 schools require some caveats. Very few ever came to SLU: The Dayton paper does and Xavier did when they were in the league. The Richmond paper travels here with VCU, but I think the Spiders beat writer may have come only once. The Olean paper came once too, and UMass came a few times. Those papers, however, are far more likely to travel to games on the East Coast, where having the St. Joe's writer go to New York or DC is not a big deal. But the P-D was probably one of just a few papers in the A10 that staffed every game my final two years. The Dayton Daily News, the Hampshire Daily Gazette and the Richmond Times-Dispatch (for VCU) were probably the others. Interesting thing about Life on the Road: My wife always wondered why anyone cared, but I got more fan mail about that than anything else I did in my entire career.
  15. Derrick Goold on the Cardinals has 53.4k followers. Jim Thomas on the Rams has 19.5k followers. Jeremy Rutherford on the Blues has 30.8k followers. I had a little over 2,000 on SLU. That's about the same as the beat guy for UMass, Matt Vautour, and about half of what Xavier's beat writer has, though I assume her numbers increased when Xavier hit the Big East.
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