- Questions to ask yourself as you go:
- Do I think this is interesting?
- Do I want to know more about this person?
- How, why, when?
- What’s different about this?
- Would I read this story?
- React to news
- Think about what’s going on in the world. Does it affect athletes? Probably. So ask how.
- Some examples, just related to coronavirus
- Spring athletes had their seasons canceled and seniors have another year of eligibility
- We’re probably past the point where a sheer reaction to that matters cause it’s been two months, but …
- Athletes who were training for the Olympics now need to make another decision about doing so
- Coaches need to manage rosters and scholarships based on an unclear number of participants
- Seniors who weren’t on scholarship now need to decide whether to come back for a 5th year they hadn’t planned on. Especially those on financial aid, how does that affect them?
- MLB Draft just got changed to 5 rounds with significantly reduced bonuses. That’s gotta affect draft decisions for the baseball team, and in turn roster construction
- How are coaches recruiting? How are players reacting to it?
- Are fall sport athletes and teams planning on a season? How are they training?
- These stories may take extra work bc there’s a lower chance of people wanting to talk about them, but more worthwhile in the long run bc higher readership
- Mgoblue.com route
- Find a team you want to write about
- Go through rosters, click on players for bios for interesting things they’ve done
- Click through coach’s bios for interesting things
- Look at a team’s stats
- Were they really good at defense? Offense?
- Did one player score a lot of goals?
- Go to news, scroll through there for stories
- The recruiting class stories are a great resource for story ideas, backstory on who players are
- Reading other stories route
- Go through past stories on our site, Freep, the News, The Athletic, Google News, 247, Rivals, etc
- Often there are details in the stories that are interesting.
- Lots of things get buried in stories because writers are focusing on a different topic. Find those details
- Google peoples’ names, see what comes up
- Google people’s parents, especially if there’s something interesting in bios about them
- If feeling extra stalker
- Go to twitter account, see if they’re interested in anything weird--cooking, movies, cats
- Go through people’s likes, Facebook profiles (esp older people, like coaches or parents, will have stuff here), Instagrams, etc
- Email SIDs
- Their job is to know stories, some are good at it and some are not
- Scroll through that team’s media account, it will have tidbits of information about athletes