Colleges need to assist in getting stories told

There is a subtle request going around the country from the Football Writers Association of America and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

For the sake of transparency, your correspondent was president of the FWAA in 2003 and continues to work on its board. And yours truly was in line to be president of the USBWA before resigning from the board.

That said, the request is one the colleges and universities should have thought of on their own. The fans of their teams deserve to know more about the players, and even the coaches.

The request is for more access to student-athletes. It’s not to fuel witch hunts, but to obtain information that can be shared with fans, readers, viewers and listeners.

When players are available, they are hand-picked by the coach, and a sports information department employee is hovering.

When interviewing kids, sincere reporters are looking for background information and anecdotes about their lives. Reporters take that information and share it, usually with fans.

Take for instance University of Arkansas freshman Isaiah Joe, the sharpshooter from Fort Smith who graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade-point average. His parents Derrick and Nicole Joe graduated from the UA. Derrick is an engineer, and Nicole is a pharmacist.

That information was not gathered from Joe, the school or his parents, but from an outside source. It was confirmed twice. Yours truly found it interesting.

A few years ago when Arkansas tight end D.J. Williams won the Disney Spirit Award, people within the UA sports information department said it was in large part thanks to columns your trusty scribe wrote about Williams’ family’s struggles with abuse.

Ask Joe Kleine where his Olympic gold medal is, and he’ll take a few minutes to find it. Ask him about his Razorbacks scrapbook, and he puts his hands on it immediately.

The courageous fight by Purdue fan Tyler Trent was chronicled by the local newspaper and became a national story.

Dabo Swinney at Clemson has an open policy, and Herm Edwards at Arizona State feels being interviewed is part of the education process for his student-athletes.

How would more access affect the schools? It might help with declining attendance. Granted, if you are at Alabama and making the College Football Playoff every season, you can be a snarling jerk and the fans are still going to buy tickets.

If you are 2-10, you better make the players the face of the program, something Eddie Sutton, Nolan Richardson and every football coach did until Houston Nutt changed the open-practice policy after someone took a picture of an injury and posted it on the internet before the parents could be contacted.

That’s a legitimate concern, but just don’t allow phones until practice is over.

Arkansas basketball is averaging fewer than 8,000 actual bodies in the seats, and part of that is because the fans don’t really know the players.

The basketball group also is asking schools to at least attempt to move media seating as close to the floor as possible. No one expects press row to move back to what is now called millionaire row, but honestly, press seating for Razorback games is so far from the floor — and behind a backboard — that it is hard to see.

Fans of all schools want to know their players, and they don’t want the information coming off a subjective website owned and operated by the school. That’s propaganda, not news or features.

It is a nationwide concern, and the schools should be just as worried about access for credentialed media as the media members.