I usually try to keep my blogs pretty light, but something unfortunate happened yesterday that will affect how we cover an athletic team from one of our local schools.

While I was calling coaches, trying to figure out which games had been postponed and which games we were missing for spring sports, I had one coach tell me that I would not be able to get stats from prior games for their team. I was told that due to a comment posted on one of our several open forums, this coach was no longer going to cooperate.

Someone had posted a comment using this coach’s name, saying that this coach had fired an assistant coach — which had not happened. The post remained up for about two hours before someone at the Journal-Courier removed the comment.

This coach’s principal saw the comment, and asked the coach about it. The coach was clearly upset by what had happened. I’m not sure if we’ll get any more stats from this coach’s team this year.

So to get to my point — which is pretty simple — please do not post comments using another person’s name. I am OK with anonymous posts, although I would encourage people to use their real names. But posting as another person is going a little too far.

The open forums on our Web site were created so people could talk about local sports. They were not created for people to make the jobs of our local coaches even more difficult.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.