Favorite minor sport to cover...

Soccer for me, but I've been blessed in that the college I cover has a great women's soccer team. Their coach will come over and shoot the shit with me and the SID during blowouts. He's as brutally honest as any coach I've ever known. His wisecracks have you thinking he should have a standup routine. The players score some world-class goals and are a ton of fun to watch.

I also enjoy softball. Nothing beats a 2-1 game that's over in 90 minutes, or better yet, the 2-0 game that's speeding along in the fourth or fifth inning when the winning team scores six quick runs and win 8-0. Game over in 70-80 minutes.

 

Ditto.

 

Yes, softball is great...they start at the same time in my area...so I often catch a softball game, then swing by a nearby baseball field and hit the last couple innings there if it's close...easy doubleheader coverage.

 

My favorites when I worked sports were juco softball and high school wrestling. But not duals or tournaments. Hated doing those. Juco softball doubleheaders were a great way to put away a few hours on the clock and actually enjoy the time.

 

I "ran" cross country and track in high school, so I've always found them extremely easy to write about. If the XC team you're covering is top heavy, write about their top finisher. If the team is good, write about the depth and talk to the guy/girl in the middle who made the difference between finishing first and second. And dual meet track is really easy to, well, track as the meet goes on. Scoring is basic so you're able to figure out the storylines as they develop and figure out where the meet will be won (usually during the high jump or shot put). I will agree that non-dual, non-league meets--where the main attraction is the relays and funky distance races, like the 500M or 1200M, and there are eight heats of everything b/c there's a thousand kids there--are fucking hell. They were hell to compete in.

I was also always the guy who volunteered to cover road races. Interview the winner, the top female finisher, get a canned quote from the race organizer about how this is the best race yet, spend a couple graphs listing the winners in other divisions, boom, done. Great way to get out of the office and finish your day early.

I always liked swimming as well. Most of our local teams competed in the winter, so it was nice to get out of the cold, and I had an interest in it b/c my best female friend in high school was the best swimmer on one of the locals so I saw a ton of her meets before I became a regular stringer for the paper. Plus, swim meets are as easy to track as track meets, and about five times as fast. In and out in 90 minutes, sometimes. (TWIWIS)

Field hockey is the worst. The absolute worst. I don't care how fast it is. As Farmer J noted, there's only so much you can write about a 1-0 game. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

 

Covered my first girls' lacrosse game of the season yesterday. Maybe this is just my personal bias again, but for some reason I find the photo work to be so much easier. All I have is a dinky point-and-click, but even with that, I got plenty of good shots. It's a weird combination of the slower speed of the sport, the easy-to-follow action, and the tighter bunching (less spacing) as opposed to soccer.

 

Field hockey on turf is an entirely different sport than field hockey on grass. And our district mandates that all tournament games must be played on turf. Coupled with the skill level in this area -- and it's established as some of the best talent in the country -- a turf game has the full-speed passing reminiscent of ice hockey.

And a 1-0 game is really rare on turf.

 

I've covered a ton of HS track and field and cross country, and don't mind them, but I find swimming and rowing to be brutal, for the same reasons.

I know that, since I've only covered them a few times, I can't appreciate whatever nuances are in front of me, but there never seems to be any actual racing going on. The top seed gets a short lead early, as expected, and everybody just sort of slogs home. The order never changes.

 

Volleyball is cool to watch, but the stop where I did the most of it had boys and girls teams, and we'd usually staff both. If both matches went five games, you were looking at an entire night at the gym. Not good.

Give me a sport with a clock. I love baseball and love watching it, but if I'm working and have the choice, I'm picking something else.