Some readers call to critique the world and national news sections or the feature section or the Utah section, but their comments seldom reach the fever pitch of those aficionados who offer chapter and verse on what should be in the daily Sports section.
E-mails from fervent fans echo the concerns of callers. They all want to know why more emphasis is not put on their favorite sport or their favorite team. Why isn’t there more women’s volleyball; or stories on speed record trials in the desert?
Why is the sky blue and how come clouds don’t fall down?
It has taken some weeks, but I have gotten some answers to the puzzler: What gets picked to be plunked in the Sports section? (Your reader advocate only cares generally about the coverage of her beloved Miami Hurricanes — currently the No. 1 college football team.)
Jim Halley, co-sports editor of The Salt Lake Tribune and the man responsible for content on those pages, says, “Faced with increasingly tighter sports sections and more sports to cover, our motto is ‘All that fits.’ How we determine what gets in those sections is our biggest headache.”
Pass the ibuprofen, Jim.
People want to know why the U. of U. and BYU seem to get the most coverage and why men’s teams dominate the printed word. “Our first priority is in-state sports,” Halley says.
“The team with the greatest amount of interest continues to be the Utah Jazz and we staff all Jazz games,” as well as those of the Salt Lake Stingers, most of the the Utah Grizzlies and the used-to-be-in-Utah Starzz. That covers the professional sports in the state.
But, Halley says, Utahns are interested also in high school teams. The Sports department keeps an eye on the 124 high school teams (emphasizing Wasatch Front schools) as well as the state’s college teams. Here’s part of the rub: Halley says the writers focus on “Division I football schools — Utah, BYU and Utah State. Because of reader interest, we focus on the main sports of football and basketball, but also do our best to cover other varsity sports, such as volleyball, gymnastics, soccer, baseball, cross country, track and field, swimming and diving, golf and tennis.” If your school is not Utah, BYU or Utah State, you will notice less coverage.
Halley adds, “We cover, as much as we can, Southern Utah and Weber State, which play Division I basketball and I-AA football. We also run many results, though rarely staff, Westminster, Utah Valley State, Salt Lake Community College, Snow College and Dixie State.” For those fans who don’t give a flying fig about in-state teams, Halley says, “We generally get a game report and a box score for every NBA game, pro football game, major league baseball game or NHL game that is played on a given day. As space permits, we also occasionally get notes in about these sports.
“During college football season, we run reports on each top 25 team [but not nearly enough on the Hurricanes], with stats on those games, plus reports on the conferences that Utah teams play in — the First, the Big Sky and next year, the Sun Belt Conference.”
Just before the Winter Olympics, the department (as did the entire Tribune staff) geared up to cover winter sports and will continue to cover major competitions, Halley says.
And then, of course, most of what used to run in the Recreation section has been transferred to the sports pages since the feature section lineup changed earlier this year.
Generally, Halley says, the philosophy is “to try to get a little bit of everything in our section. Better to get a little bit in than none at all.”
And for you NASCAR and racing fans, here’s the bad news, according to Halley: “When we asked readers in a recent survey to make a choice of what sports they would like to see more of, even if that meant seeing less of another sport, more readers chose to see less NASCAR coverage than any other major sport.”
For those, like me, who fail to see the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, I found what a few famous people have said about America’s obsession with professional sports:
- Ted Turner, founder of CNN: “Sports is like a war without the killing.”
- Howard Cosell, deceased sports reporter/commentator: “Sports is the toy department of human life.”
- And former Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren: “I always turn to the sports page first. . . . They record people’s accomplishments; the front page, nothing but man’s failure.”
