Football: Standing by the Carabins bloggers...

One good rule of thumb is to always look for the good which might come out of an unpleasant situation. There are two sides to every story, but having heard that the blog-writin' duo from from Allez Les Bleus were turned down for credentials to Montreal-Concordia game does show why each conference and the CIS should look to adopt a blog policy (something many leagues have done already). It is regrettable this happened, and that is only being said in light of how hard the father-and-son team work at their site:

"Let me clarify that, as far as we know, no print, nor radio, nor television journalist covers Concordia football team even on an episodical base. In Montreal, actually, there is NOT a print journalist (we have to exclude Serge Vleminckx who actually works for a net based newspaper) that covers CIS football on a regular basis. So we cannot say there is a crowd of valuable accreditation to be distribute ...

"And ConU snubs bloggers like us who have written over 140 posts regarding University football over the last year and have over 500 people coming in daily to get their University football dose? We also are the second most popular football blog in Québec."

"Snub" might be bit of a strong word to parrot, since the rationale is not known. It's appreciated that there might be some control issues for the universities, but at the end of the day, the time and space traditional media have for university sports is shrinking. Also, many since salaried media members are bloggin' on the side, so leaving the labour-of-love folks out in the cold seems unfair.

Perhaps this seems a bit like inside baseball, but there's some put-yourself-in-their-shoes. This site owes a lot of its growth to sports information directors, coaches and athletes nationwide who have been very accommodating. If there's a school which hasn't helped us, it's because we didn't think to ask. Most universities have been ahead of the curve compared to other leagues.

In the past few months, team-specific (Huskies Football Outsider), school specific (Le Pony Express) sport-specific (cishoops.ca) and conference-specific (Always OUA). There are lots more to come, and hopefully the schools get on the same page.