It’s my belief that every high school athlete in Clark County should have an active Facebook account.
It’s not too much of a stretch. They all probably already do.
But if you don’t, it might be time to reconsider.
And here’s why.
In the past four weeks, The Columbian has held an online poll on our prep sports Facebook page asking fans to vote for our athlete of the week.
In each of those four weeks, we’ve received between 500 and 725 votes.
Our “likes” on our Facebook page have more than doubled over that span.
When we started this feature early last month, we really weren’t sure what to expect. How many people would vote? How would they vote? What would be the results?
Actually, the results have been somewhat surprising. We thought that perhaps the basketball players would dominate the balloting. They haven’t.
In four weeks, we’ve had an athlete of the week who was a boys basketball player, a girls basketball player, a swimmer and a gymnast. (Isn’t it time to show a bowler or a wrestler a little love?)
We thought that maybe athletes from small schools wouldn’t stand a good chance of winning. But we had an athlete from a 1B school finish a very close second in balloting.
In the end, the poll has been very successful.
I’ve only received one complaint — from someone who said that the poll was nothing more than a popularity contest.
Um, yes, it is.
It’s kind of like the Academy Awards. The real honor is in being nominated. The result of the balloting is not always indicative of the most deserving nominee.
It’s just the nominee who got the most people to vote for him or her.
So if you have a Facebook account, and you have a lot of friends, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-promotion. There’s nothing wrong with friends, parents, coaches or schools promoting an athlete.
You don’t have to defend the reasoning for your vote. You just have to vote. It’s hard to go wrong. All five nominees are deserving.
Voting starts every Monday and runs through Thursday night at www.facebook.com/360preps.
We’ll even post little summaries on each athlete to show why you should vote for him or her.
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There’s another reason for having a Facebook account.
I find it a handy tool to ensure that we spell names correctly.
Not every name entered into a scorebook is correct. The spelling of names submitting by coaches for players on their own team are not always dependable. We’ve even seen the occassional printed roster that is incorrect. All-league teams are often submitted with loads of spelling errors.
So when I see a name that doesn’t look quite right, I do a search for that name on Facebook. Often, that leads to me a correct spelling.
So open up that Facebook account today.
Oh, and it might be a good idea to spell your name correctly.
• • •
The postseason has arrived for area high school basketball teams. But some league still have tight races to determine playoff berths.
But rather than try to cram them all in here, I’m just going to direct you to The Columbian’s high school blog and www.columbian.com/weblogs/highschoolsports. There will find all the playoff possibilities for boys and girls basketball, as well as matchups and schedules for district tournaments.
Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep cordinator for The Columbian. He can be reached at (360) 735-4538 or email at tim.martinez@columbian.com
