One morning when coaching in Sweden I had the experience of looking at my Facebook feed and noticing a piece from the Oresundliga page. It related to that night’s match between my team (Svedala) and the Danish side Amager. Said page linked to a Swedish newspaper story about the match. The reporter suggested we were expecting a 3-0 or 3-1 win. Supposedly, this came from our team manager.
Cue inward groan. š
I messaged said manager upon seeing the story and said, “Did you really tell a reporter that we’d win 3-0 or 3-1 tomorrow?“
His response was that he never said such a thing. He told her that we beat Amager 2-1 in preseason and that we had thus far won our home matches 3-0. As it turns out, the conversation took place on a Thursday before our most recent Saturday home match. That match ended 3-1. He said, however, the reporter in question sounded like a fill-in who didn’t really know anything about volleyball.
Request to reporters:
Reporters, don’t make sh_t up. If you give the other team “locker room material” like that when we never said any such thing, we stop talking to you. I realize volleyball is not a high profile sport. Still, we deserve the respect of fair reporting.
Postscript to the story: We lost the match 0-3 as documented here.
