Week 12

Even though I have essentially said this each of the past six weeks, the men's basketball season really, legitimately got underway this week. On Saturday was the first exhibition, on Thursday was the second and on Monday the team plays its first game. I wrote a couple basic stories this week and anticipating writing at least three for next week, so I am starting to get into the groove.

One thing that kind of concerned me, and John and I discussed this a bit on Thursday, is story ideas. I am glad that we are being pushed beyond writing the typical game stories that the other papers are writing, but at the same time I don't want to use all of the good ideas early. For my recap of the exhibition game on Saturday, I basically wrote a profile on guard JT. It was the pretty obvious angle, and I included most of the stuff available, so now I worry that it will be hard to focus on this player again. When John was looking for ideas for his story on Thursday's exhibition, we decided that it would be better not to do a profile-type game story. If we go down that road for every game, we won't have anything left by game 12.

So that is something that we have been talking about. That's not to say that the profile-angled game story is never going to happen again, but when they do they probably will be a little different than the story I wrote on JT. If we are going to focus on a player for the game story, I think it is more relevant and better to write the story with an overall focus on what he did in the game. A lot of these players have interesting backgrounds etc., but I think if we are going to do more personalized features we should do them right, which for the most part means running them separate from game recaps.

That is one thing that we are going to have to talk about now that the season is underway. It was sometimes challenging to think of good angles for these exhibition games, mainly because they are for the most part irrelivent, and that made it easy to yearn for the straightforward game story. Now that the regular season is underway and the games count and the stats are relevant, I think it will be a lot easier to find good angles and it will be acceptable to run them. This is something that John and I are going to have to look in the archives to see what they did last year, and we need to talk to Greg and see what he thinks and what some other angles are.

Speaking of which, it is probably getting close to that time to schedule a weekly meeting with Greg. Who just arrived, so I am going to stop writing now.