An Introduction

Though it is a common belief that the media should be objective, how objective can a person covering the sports of a small town truly be? The home team is always played-up in local media no matter what the outcome of the game, because the townspeople aren't man enough to hear the brutal truth about their team, which can be hard to swallow.

In a loss situation, local papers and broadcasters will sugarcoat the defeat by focusing on the glimpses of blue in a mostly overcast sky of mediocre to poor athletic performance on the part of the home-team.

In a win situation, it's more of the same, though it becomes much easier to make the home team sound good.

This isn't to say that the local media is lying, so long as omitting the truth isn't considered lying. Or is it?

Boone is no different.

The points of pride of Mountaineer Athletics are played up, the other ones are concealed for the most part.
Case in point: If you ever check out the sports section of The Watauga Democrat, you may have read that Saturday's game against Youngstown State had a playoff record crowd of 18,040. What you didn't read was the fact that that figure still fell well short of the regular season attendance, which was 22,588. Why does this figure never make it to the presses? Because it speaks poorly about our school spirit. Around 4,000 fans decided not to go to the game Saturday because they'd rather watch it on ESPN from the warmth of their houses, apartments, and dorms, despite the fact that it could have been the last game of the season, it was supposed to be a half-way decent game to watch, and there was a chance of getting your face on nationwide television.

Sports Information offices are notorious for make near-empty glasses seem at least half full.
Appalachian Sports Information makes it an art form.
"Appalachian opened the game with an early 4-2 lead on a Clayton layup with 17:15 on the clock." ~Appalachian Sports Information, www.goasu.com
Believe it or not, that's pretty much the only "high point" of the Appalachain men's basketball massacre Sunday, in a 69-37 loss to Virginia Tech.
Here's a sentence from the same article that is particularly amusing:
"The Mountaineers tried to stage a run to open up the second half and got back within 17 points twice in the period, but couldn’t hold cut into the lead against a team that shot 58 percent in the second half."
It's stated as if being within 17 is some major feat, when that is the case only when compared to the fact that they lost by over 30.

But where is the honesty in all this? Can't we speak freely for just a second, and stop sugarcoating the performance of our athletics?

Why can't we be blunt, and say "The ASU men's basketball team got their asses handed to them by the Hokies Saturday, in the third-straight loss to an ACC team. Even so, the outcome of the game has little meaning, because who really considers the Southern Conference on the same playing-field as the ACC anyway? The only opposition in common for these teams is Wake Forest, who Virginia Tech will play on the 17th (App lost to Wake in Winston-Salem by 10 over the Thanksgiving holiday), and UNC-Greensboro, which both teams have yet to play."?

My mission is not to provide good P.R. for the school unless warranted, OR bash it for no apparent reason. But rather to provide an uncensored window into the truth of Appalachian sports, which is something you cannot find by reading The Appalachian or The Watauga Democrat.