Folks over on the lax message board at TheSabre.com have been giving Luke Neer at WINA-1070AM crap over his softball interview with the new UVA Men’s Lacrosse coach, Kevin Cassese.
And I mean, I get it – we all have questions about how that whole situation over there is playing out, with:
- Lars Tiffany being forced out.
- and then, per reporting from Inside Lacrosse, Carla Williams reached out to Dan Chemotti at Richmond about the job.
- before going with Cassese, who was on Tiffany’s staff.
- and the latest: Tiffany is saying he signed a three-year extension before it was taken off the table, and wants the money that he would have been paid.
ICYMI
- UVA Lacrosse: Lars Tiffany is out as head coach, and no one knows why, for sure
- UVA Lacrosse: Williams stays in-house, names Kevin Cassese head coach
- Lars Tiffany says he signed the extension: UVA Lacrosse is a total mess now
To be fair to Luke, and not just because he had me on his show several times – though that has surely come to an end, with my repeated knocks at WINA for trying to be full-out MAGA on the UVA Athletics dime – what is his job here?
WINA is, for now, the flagship station of UVA Athletics.
Which isn’t offering Kevin Cassese up for a live interview to take on a full frontal assault regarding everything going on behind the scenes with the lacrosse program.
The job of a Luke Neer is to pretend all the stuff going on around the UVA Lacrosse program isn’t in the equation, and focus his interview on Cassese so that listeners get a sense of the new guy as a person, and as a lacrosse coach.
Does anybody offer themselves up for tough live (or live-to-tape) interviews anymore?
If you want to know why I don’t do a lot of live or live-to-tape interviews, this is why.
If you want to know why I don’t do press conferences anymore, this is why.
Luke’s interview came after a half-hour of softballs at the introductory press conference for Cassese that was only different from what Luke did in that it was several so-called journalists lobbing up the softballs, instead of just the one guy doing it.
Luke has a better radio voice than any of the ink-stained wretches, which is why you get to hear him in drivetime, instead of having to hunt him down on the interwebs.
I’ve got no problem here with Luke Neer.
The bigger problem is the way we all do media these days.
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Chris Graham
