The Game Plan By Charles Prince

The North Jefferson News



With just a click of the mouse you can find out something about any sports team or sporting event you’re interested in these days.

With the internet, you can keep up with the play-by-play of your favorite college football team, or follow the major league baseball playoffs pitch-by-pitch or watch a game from many different locations that aren’t shown in your local area.

On the other side, there are so many web sites out there today that sometimes information is posted that’s not accurate. I’ve seen this happen several times over the past few years on web sites devoted to high school sports. Sometimes info isn’t verified before its posted, or the person in charge of the site is no longer involved with posting info, but the site is still out there in cyberspace.

Let me give you two examples of what I mean.

A web site in our state that lists high school football scores, sometimes has listed incorrect scores on their site. Having made my share of mistakes over the years in the newspaper, I’m sure many of these mistakes are come from simply transposing of numbers.

On Sept. 14, the Corner Yellow Jackets faced St. Clair County. Corner fell in a close game 6-3. However, if you look on the AHSAA’s web site scoreboard for that day, you’ll see the score listed as a 6-3 Corner win, not a loss. I’m sure the numbers were just entered backwards.

Folks outside of Jefferson County viewing that site might feel confident the score is correct and that Corner picked up a win that night, but they didn’t.

A second internet error you need to watch for is web sites that haven’t been updated in a while. I feel victim to this one last year, even though I should know better.

One of our area football teams was headed to the playoffs for the first time in years and one excited fan sent me some stats for the team they would soon to face.

His e-mail informed me he took the numbers right off the school’s web site.

Now, when it comes playoff time, I usually try to talk with the coaches from both teams involved in a game before writing the game preview.

So armed with the team’s stats I’ve been sent, I call the coach of the club who will soon face off with our local school.

As I begin asking him about some of his team leaders, I throw out a name from the stats list I had received.

To my surprise, the coach informed me that player had graduated the year before.

Wouldn’t you know it, the school’s web site hadn’t been updated since the season before and the stats I was sent were from the year before.

Yes, the internet is great, but it’s often best to verify the info you see with a another human being before you take what you see as fact.