With press passes, MSHSL must do better

I went to college in New Hampshire, the state that votes first in the national primary election.
Basically, if you wanted to win the presidential nomination from either major political party, you had to spend a lot of time shaking hands in small towns, holding massive rallies in arenas, and holding town hall meetings in churches in many small towns.
My small college has had visits from major candidates, such as the likes of Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and others.
I had aspirations of going onto law school after college, but then during the summer going into my junior year, I had the chance to attend a boot camp of sorts hosted by my university’s journalism school.
The idea was to put a group of political science and non-traditional journalism students together along with those in J-school to see who could and would be part of political reporting for the 2016 Presidential Election.
I was interning with the Rhode Island Attorney General that summer, but I had decided a few days of playing journalist would be fun.
This was not playing. This was 12-hour days learning how to do interviews, what went into writing a story, criss-crossing the state to learn about different campaigns, and conducting interviews.
One of my first interviews was with our college president, Andy Card, once one of the most powerful men in the world.
He was the longest tenured Chief of Staff for George W. Bush. On 9/11, he famously whispered in the president’s ear.
This was fun. I decided maybe being a journalist would be more rewarding than being a lawyer, so I spent the next 15 months covering politics through our partnership with the Boston Herald.
The idea was that the more press credentials we could earn while in New Hampshire, the more clips we could get, which would make it easier to get press credentials for the national political conventions that summer.
We went everywhere across southern New Hampshire. The most frequent events we covered were Donald Trump’s. He spent a lot of time in New Hampshire almost always selling out arenas.
That summer, after we put together solid resumes, working with one of the biggest news organizations in the region, we earned press credentials to cover both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
We had to go through the Secret Service credential process as well, with—I assumed—someone doing a deep dive into the journalists who applied.
But this was understandable. The pass gave us unfettered access to cover anything happening inside the arenas when history was being made, including being able to go onto the convention floor and interview delegates.
Fast forward a decade. It has been harder and more frustrating for me to try getting press passes to cover high school state tournaments in this state than it was to cover high-security national political events.
My frustration began this fall, when the KoMets made the high school state football tournament.
I applied for two press passes to allow for our dedicated photographers, Angie Richards and K-M student Tayte Severson.
They were both approved as they both had been the past winter, with Tayte covering the girls hockey tournament and Angie covering wrestling.
They both were able to cover the first and second rounds. Then the morning of the championship game I was made aware that Tayte’s press pass was revoked because they learned he was a student.
As we editorialized in the fall, this is ridiculous. Tayte is a great photographer, and since he is treated like a professional photographer all year round, it’s hard to understand why there are different rules for the tournament.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I applied for Tayte to get a press pass for the girls hockey tournament.
Then right before the tournament, again his press pass was revoked due to these ridiculous rules. And how, I argued, are people supposed to know if they are being enforced when press passes are originally approved then revoked?
Then we got to wrestling. I applied for two passes, one for myself and one for Angie. We have other dedicated photographers, but the League only allows two press passes for weekly papers, and since Angie has been the longest tenured, I decided it would be fair to pick her.
I got an email the day before the tournament. Since I also applied for a pass, they decided to revoke Angie’s because the League has a rule, apparently now being enforced, saying weekly papers only get one press pass.
One press pass for four schools we cover seems completely unfair to everyone. Our coverage area used to have four papers covering it not too long ago.
Now, due to many of those papers closing, our one paper has absorbed all of the coverage area. We are blessed to have photographers to help us, but due to these ridiculous rules, we couldn’t bring them along.
To be clear: If we had four newspapers, we could get four different passes. There are some newspapers who likely did that.
Needless to say, I did not have a pass for the state high school wrestling tournament.
Maybe a major political event will happen this year at one of the sports arenas. It will likely be easier to get a pass to that than an MSHSL tournament.