Favorite minor sport to cover...

One of the coolest things I ever covered were the Penn Relays. The Saturday climax to it all. What a spectacle.

 

Blessing and a curse. Blessing in the sense that there are so many events/athletes that you can almost always find someone from your school/area who won something. Curse in that there are so many events/athletes, it's hard to narrow the focus sufficiently and I fight the urge to get every name included as I wait for the dreaded phone call/email "Why didn't you write about MY son? He was fifth in the 800 meters"

 

Or worse, if you have a big event with like four or more area schools.

/shudder

 

I've always found track to be easy as pie to write about, by treating it as several mini-stories. Find the biggest one -- local team winning, or local athlete winning multiple events -- and lead with it. Write 6 or 7 inches on it. Next, segue into another local team, get a quote or two from a coach or athlete and write a few inches on them.
Rinse, lather, repeat. Maybe cut it short and sum up if you have more than a couple teams at the meet.
Most coaches know going in who's going to do well, and have an idea how they're actually doing well before the meet is over. Time it right and you can spend an hour out there toward the end of the meet making the rounds and getting your quotes. Pick up the results when it's over (or get them called/faxed/e-mailed), and you have a story that's basically as long as you need it to be.

Bigger meets, of course, are different. But for the run of the mill weekend meets? It's a good formula.

 

my response
"Because he was 5th"

 

This is correct and right.

 

I like volleyball, probably more than girls' basketball, because it's much more three-dimensional, whereas everyone jumps the same in girls' basketball and that normally means that if you've got a few tall girls and can run a press, it's going to get ugly. Also, there's a good deal of serious pent-up aggression that manifests itself in a big swing for a kill and the resulting celebration.

It's a personal goal of mine in photography to get one shot of someone getting six-packed (hit in the face with the ball). That's when I quit.

I also enjoy it because it's one of the few sports I don't suck at, whereas basketball is one of my worst.

There are also other fringe benefits I dare not discuss, but I think you know what I'm discussing.

 

Soccer is my favorite, though volleyball is a close second.

Covering Australian Rules football was a blast, but that has a ways to go before it can even approach "minor sport" status outside its homeland.

 

I absolutely love the game of tennis and cover it a good amount, but I find it incredibly hard to write about in a compelling way. Try like hell to make it feature-like, but almost always it's kid from a pretty good background who hasn't faced a ton of adversity in life, and he got good by just playing tons. That's painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions of course that make for good human interest stories, I just can never seem to have one to tell.

 

Ditto for golf.

 

Ditto for swimming.

 

My favorite sports to cover are field hockey and volleyball, with the former being the hardest one to write about. After so many years, there's just so much to say about a 1-0, two-shot game.

I love softball and lacrosse, and there is a really high-calliber girls' lacrosse team in the area. I've kind of lost it on softball since it's so damn cold and the pitching in our area has gone down some, so we don't have any dominant teams.

I had a great time once covering a district badmitton/table tennis championship. In our neck of the woods, it's a yearly event that the kids practice for during a semester in gym. I could have had five game-features come out of that day. Sad offshoot though. One of the kids from the tournament was killed in a DWI a few weeks later. He was also the star runningback that played against our area's first state football team earlier that school year. I still get a raw feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about it.