J. TODD FOSTER: D-B’s Private Little Clubhouse

By J. Todd Foster
Editor / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: August 23, 2008

The good folks at Dobyns-Bennett High School apparently don’t understand the meaning of the term “press box.” Either that, or they were engaging in an act of discrimination on Thursday night when they refused to admit one of our sportswriters to the press section to cover the D-B football game with Tennessee High.

Brian T. Smith, the Herald Courier’s assistant sports editor and the writer designated to cover this game, even took the unusual step of calling ahead Thursday morning to reserve a spot in the press box at J. Fred Johnson Stadium in Kingsport.

“I was told it was not a problem – the person even laughed when I asked to reserve the spot and said something to the extent of ‘just come on up and grab a space,’ ” Smith said.

Yet, when Smith arrived 30 minutes before kickoff, he was turned away.

No room, he was told, even though there were several empty chairs – none of which were reserved with name tags. There appeared to be an inordinate amount of civilians milling around the press box though, but still some empty seats.

Even after a D-B official cleared Smith for the press box, he was turned away a second time.

He wound up roaming the sidelines – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but had to write his game story while sitting on the ground. That is a bad thing. Because writing a story with your laptop on your knees is not conducive to solid deadline performance, and Smith and every other journalist who works here knows how ornery managing editors can get when deadlines are blown.

A consummate professional, Smith filed his story on time. He was even willing to let the press box slight go. I’m not, however.

Dobyns-Bennett is a public school funded by tax dollars. It has no right to turn its press box into a tree house for adult men and a handful of hand-picked journalists. I called both Principal Earl Lovelace and Athletic Director Cary Daniels on Friday to get at the heart of his incident and prevent its future occurrence, but my calls were not returned. So I ran the situation past Rick Hollow, the general counsel of the Tennessee Press Association since 1971.

“This is a public educational institution,” Hollow said. “It is not a college or a university. It’s a high school. And it’s supported by taxpayer dollars. It is an arm or an instrumentality of the government because it is provided by the government for the use of its citizens.”

Those citizens, by the way, just spent $1.25 million to put artificial turf on the Dobyns-Bennett football field. Those same taxpayers are spending untold thousands to pay the school’s 15 football coaches – at least that’s the number pictured on the school’s Web page.

“This is not a tree house,” Hollow said. “It’s not part of the bleachers. It is a press box. It’s for the use of media so that the media can transmit reports about the athletic events that take place there to citizens who otherwise can’t attend but may be interested in those athletic events. The reporter is a surrogate for the people.”

There’s more than a principle involved here. I don’t like it when our journalists are singled out and mistreated without cause.

For Smith, the double press box rejections felt like a “personal slight toward me and the BHC, especially since other regional writers and media members were allowed in the box.”

I still would like to discuss this with Principal Lovelace and Athletic Director Daniels. Since a call would be long distance, they’re welcome to call me collect, although Mr. Lovelace is the third-highest-paid employee in the Kingsport Schools system, at more than $92,000 a year. (Daniels earns more than $73,000 a year.)

For the record, Dobyns-Bennett won the football game against Tennessee High 42-13. But in the game of professionalism and civility, D-B got skunked.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.