Basketball Preview: What do you do?

It's getting close to basketball time, and I'm getting ready for basketball season at my paper. We're considering doing a separate boys basketball preview this year, which is a first.

What do you do at your shop? I'm curious to know what some others have done and what works well.

Do you produce a separate section? Or do you include it in the normal sports section? Preview articles on every local team, or capsules? Schedules?

 

Depends on the size of your coverage area. At my place we have around 30 schools, and we go league by league. We'll do a story on the team we think is going to win the league, and then 150-200 word capsules that we run in agate type to save space on the rest of the teams in the league.

The amount of space is going to depend on the ads. It doesn't need to take up a whole section, and I don't think you run the schedules, unless you have a small number of teams and can fit them in. At my place, the ad staff can't sell anything related to high school sports. Whether they're trying or not is another matter. But we can preview all of our teams -- about 60 in all (boys and girls) -- in five pages, using capsules for most of them.

If you have a small number of schools you definitely want full stories on each team. And don't forget the girls' teams. You mention doing a separate section on the boys' teams. Prepare for the angry phone calls if you don't give the girls' teams equal treatment.

 

Our daily covers 14 high schools.
The winter preview has write-ups on each boys and girls basketball team, the wrestling teams and the schools with swimming. We haven't included the bowling teams yet, but probably will soon since bowling has been state-sanctioned sport for the past few years. We also have a cover story, and include the varsity team pictures and the schedules.

 

We run conference-wide previews and put it into the normal sports section.

 

Same as football - tab with a story/photo of each team that comes out at the beginning of the first week of the season. Girls comes out first, normally the Monday after Thanksgiving, with boys a week later.