General ideas for a column?

JR, I'm a reporter in a four-man sports department. Everyone writes a sports column each week (mine's for Friday's paper, due Thursday night). I've never written a column before, so I don't really know how to approach it. I know it'd be easier if I knew the area better, too.

I'm definitely going to try and chat it up with the coaches and players more to try to brew up some ideas, though.

 

Have any local kids in the Minors? Talk to them, the director of player development and the team's manager.
Conditioning tips?
Is there an off season summer for coaches?
Are there rules changes upcoming for football? What do coaches think?
Think of them as a feature in the first person...

 

Dunno about local kids in the minor leagues, I need to talk to some people and figure that out. However, there is a new high school in the area. Any ideas of an interesting angle to approach besides a preview story?

 

Um, yeah. Is the high school taking kids from one or more schools? Could be interesting to see how they create a team from scratch and what happens to the teams who lost the kids.

 

Jay, I apologize for being an asshole. Seriously. I was out of line.

I'm not a journalist but it seems to me, as a reader I want to know some inside stuff about the folks you're covering.

Once again, sorry for being a smartass.

 

Go hang out with the football coach and find out what he is doing to prepare for a season where he doesn't know his players and their strengths, etc. and where NO ONE knows about his players (unlike a new coach at an established school, he can't watch last year's game films).

 

No worries, I wasn't catching feelings. I was just letting you know I'm not some hack columnist who came here for free ideas. Column-writing is a bit out of my element

 

Also, Pope and Writebrained, those are very good ideas. I'm writing them down as we speak.

 

A column idea that I've always wanted to do is sit down with a football coach (preferably one who has a reputation for being successful) and learn what they look for when they watch game film. We hear all the time about how coaches love to watch film or they need to look at the film to see what happened. So what is a good high school coach looking for when he watches the film? As a reader, I'm always curious about that stuff because it changes how you watch the game.

 

Hey Jay,

I’d recommend picking up a book of Jim Murray or Rick Reilly or Shirley Povich columns. Read them like an editor and dissect each paragraph. Why is this idea here? What is this sentences purpose? Get a feel for how they should flow and feel. Read one or two a night before you go to bed for a week and by the end of the week you will be reading five or six or 50 pages at a time.

As for immediate ideas – PDB is right on, I was always a fan of shadowing coaches, players, etc... Find the old janitor at the local high school. What players or plays or games does he remember? People who have been in the community for years will eat it up.

Columns are as much poetry and art as they are writing. I’ve been writing columns my whole career, in fact, I just started to do gamers/articles/features. Once you get a feel for what YOU want to sound like, they are a blast.

Jim Murray once wrote (I hope I’m quoting this correctly), “Writing a column is like riding a tiger, you’d like to stop, but you have no idea how.”

He was right.

 

This reminds me of a story I came across back in the day when I was covering a high school beat. One of the schools on the beat was known for having a number of athletes from single-parent homes, so I asked around about the kinds of jobs the kids had and how they managed school, practice, family obligations and any kind of job. Turns out that one of the wrestlers was working part-time as a janitor at the school. After practice each night, it was his job to clean the school, mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. (For those wondering, there were no rules violations because he worked for a company that was contracted to clean the place.) Led to a fascinating column about how the kid struggled to keep it all together.

 

I think a column about your roommate playing Wii might be really interesting to read. But its got to be good. Write it and save it for a time where you really have nothing to write, or no time to do a column.