All-state hoops gone forever

The headline you just read above is just a beat-up, road-weary, wore-slick, veteran sports writer calling his shot about the likelihood of media in Missouri ever selecting all-state basketball teams again.

If one were to write an obituary about this, it might read something like this:

Missouri all-state basketball teams, chosen by media, were born during the 1951-52 school year. They went on life support when no teams were chosen for the 2014-15 season when two or three precincts had difficulty getting someone interested in doing it. And, they officially died in April 2016, primarily because the state’s biggest newspaper (by daily and Sunday circulation), located in western Missouri, decided it didn’t give a southbound end of a northbound rat about being a participant any more.

Former Princeton football coach Shane Cavanah is a loyal subscriber to this newspaper (The Princeton Post-Telegraph). After the 1968 season, the Tigers’ Class A (now Class 1) championship campaign, he praised the work of a certain newspaper’s sports writers and decried the youthful inexperience of the writers the St. Joseph News-Press sent to cover

the championship game.

Here’s a shout-out to the hall-of-famer:

Coach, things have turned 180 degrees in this part of the state when comparing the high school coverage of those two publications. The News-Press, now, is vastly superior, so much so that it isn’t really funny. Or close. Coach, it’s kind of like comparing the Post-Telegraph with, or without, your favorite social news.

Forgive me for this rant. It’s just that being a participant in this process the past 39 school years has been a major part of my career, and to see the basketball part of it end so ingloriously just royally ticks me off. I’ve spent hundreds of hours filling out ballots, going to all-district and all-state selection meetings in basketball and football, hunting down (hopefully) original photos, and writing stories about the results. Filled a lot of scrapbooks (Hey, Dan Owens, got yours done yet?) and covered a lot of refrigerator doors.

I hope I’m wrong about this. But I am not one bit optimistic about it.

Preston Cole is the editor of the Princeton Post-Telegraph and has written about high school sports in that publication spanning five decades and two centuries.