High School Sports Coverage: Design Tips

Covering high school sports to the satisfaction of the local community is one of those Catch 22 challenges of a sports section.

No one is ever satisfied. Either your sports section focuses primarily on local school sports to the dismay of the average sports fan or your sports department gives most of its effort and room to covering professional sports, leaving your local parents and coaches feeling unappreciated and undercovered. More often, the complaints come in from both sides.

As much as a staffing challenge, this is a space and design challenge. Given the room you have to fill with sports news, there is simply no way to cover everything and choices must be made.

The right mix, the wrong design

Your sports department should already have a philosophy about how to balance local vs. professional sports coverage. This is a good starting place to assess how well it is getting the job done. If the mix is right, it really comes down to execution and organization. Just as important, your approach should be crystal clear for readers.

Here are some basic tips for getting your organization and execution right in print:

• Create a home for your local sports coverage each day. This should be clear because it is consistently on one page or area of the section each day (such as Page 3 or the back half of the section) or because it is clear on the section front where it can be found that day.
• Request ad profile changes if necessary to give yourself a consistent sports hole to work with if your design solution calls for it. If this is not something your department does, your editor should explore what types of requests can be made and how often they can be accommodated. Be careful about designing yourself into a box that will be difficult to use on pages with ads.
• Give your sports section a local inside spread on a certain day each week where you can provide better local coverage in a weekly wrapup.
• If your professional/local content mix calls for it, find a clear way on your section front to highlight the high school game results. These could be a collection of the top games in headline or refer form with a page indicator, combined with game art and a lead story. This could be done in a narrow rail or across the bottom of the page or as part of an art package to be placed on the page. To make it easy to use, there should be flexible approaches that work whether or not photos and stories are available. This can be as simple as having a headline or refer style that gets used flexibly and predictably with your high school sports package.
• To the extent that your local coverage is limited each day to just the key games, point readers each day to the weekly wrapup or to your more in depth online coverage.
• Most importantly, find a place to concisely explain to readers what they can expect for coverage of their high school teams. Explain what is available online and what goes into print. Turn this into a graphic refer to your online coverage.

Reworking online sports content

Most newspapers do a fair job with the above tips. But this does not solve the problem of not having the space to adequately cover local teams. The solution to this issue is to expand online sports efforts before the high schools do it themselves.

Here are a few suggestions for ways to do this. In my opinion, the following suggestions should be implemented, or at least discussed with your online site developers to see what is feasible:

• Create an online local sports realm with content organized either by schools or sport.
• Add important information here that normally doesn’t fit in the print version, such as schedules, game locations, directions to the away games, athlete profiles, game results during the season and a place for the coaches to comment on team progress.
• Stories also should be categorized by sport or school and stories from the current season should be located in an easy-to-find browsable location.
• If you want to aggressively court a larger audience, branch your online coverage out to rival teams and bigger picture regional high school sports news that are not covered in your daily sports section.
• Consider giving your local teams an area on the site clearly theirs to manage that they can update with their own content.