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. 🙁

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.

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John Forman
John Forman

John is currently the Talent Strategy Manager (oversees the national teams) and Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England, as well as Global Director for Volleyball for Nation Academy. His volleyball coaching experience includes all three NCAA divisions, plus Junior College, in the US; university and club teams in the UK; professional coaching in Sweden; and both coaching and club management at the Juniors level. He's also been a visiting coach at national team, professional club, and juniors programs in several countries. Learn more on his bio page.

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