SPORTS occupy a large role in our society. Compare the number of people at the Virginia-Richmond football game - many - with the number of people who turned out to hear the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court - not so many. And as Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden likes to point out, 70,000 people aren't going to watch someone take a quiz.
It follows that the sports section is one of the most widely-read sections of any newspaper. As a former sportswriter, I take a particular interest in sports coverage - in this case, the performance of The Cavalier Daily.
Game coverage is the backbone of the section. With good game coverage, a newspaper can point out things readers may have missed while watching, provide interesting quotes about crucial plays, and tell a story to readers who missed the game. With bad game coverage, a newspaper can simply rehash events or even miss the important aspects of the game entirely. Last Monday's issue had game stories that provided examples of both the good and the bad.
The women's soccer story was one of the good ones. The reporter avoided one of the biggest traps for inexperienced sportswriters - the sequential story. In a game that was 2-1 at halftime and ended 3-2, the reporter correctly focused on the tying and game-winning goals early in the story in order to provide the reader with the most important information first.
This may sound like a no-brainer, but too often, college reporters' game stories proceed as follows: "First part of the game, then this, then that, then it was over." After all, isn't that how ESPN does it? ESPN knows you will keep watching - a newspaper has no such assurance from a reader.
A simple tool for where to start: If you were telling someone about the game, what would you tell them first? In a game decided by a last-second shot, would I start with the first five minutes of the game? No. The women's soccer story may have ignored the first half a little too much, but it takes time to learn how to strike a balance between highlighting the most important events and filling in the details that led up to those events.
This brings me to the bad. The football game against N.C. State was 3-0 at halftime and ended 24-0. The outcome was in doubt at halftime, yet the reporter wrote nine paragraphs on the first half and only three paragraphs on the second half at the end of the story. In the field hockey game, Virginia won in sudden-death overtime, but the winning goal was not described until the eighth of 12 paragraphs. A reader should not have to read so far to find out how the game was decided.
Starting at the beginning is not always the wrong choice - sometimes a crucial play may happen early and change the entire game. The game may be a boring blowout, and describing how the blowout started may be ideal.
Again, learning this takes time, and these reporters are by no means the only ones to make this mistake. Even after the famous Florida State football upset in 1995, the Cavalier Daily reporter did not mention the tension-packed final play until the next-to-last paragraph of the story. Not good.
There are other elements to game coverage besides the game story. For example, The Cavalier Daily uses a "You called it a day when ..." box to describe an important play in each football game. This is a good idea. Of course, it should be right - the box for the N.C. State game describes the Wolfpack scoring in the fourth quarter. According to the "Breakdown" box on the previous page - another good feature - the Wolfpack did not score in the fourth quarter. Making the section look good is important, but so is getting it right.
Previews are also part of game coverage. The "Gameday" feature - a package giving readers various information about the game - is an excellent break from the normal "Virginia hopes to win" approach that preview stories tend to have. Thursday's preview of the ACC field hockey tournament was solid, complete with quotes from opposing coaches and a bracket. There was a discrepancy between the story and the bracket, however. The story talks of the "other first-round game" - implying there is more than one - but the bracket shows just one first-round game. Also, on that same page, the Virginia-Duke volleyball match was described as five matches. There were five games, but only one match. A volleyball match also should have the complete score in the newspaper - this has been a recurring problem.
Of course, getting it right applies to the entire newspaper, not just to the sports section. But game coverage is a unique task. Many people think sportswriting is easy because they see too many sequential game stories - how hard could that be, just writing what happened? Bad sportswriting is easy, no doubt. Good sportswriting, however, involves focusing on the key events and presenting them in an appropriate order. This is a harder task, but it is the correct task to undertake.
(Matthew Branson can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.)