How fine-tuned are your college basketball gamers by halftime

That happened to me when I covered D1 hoops. ranked team facing an unranked conference opponent and seemed in control by half, so I pounded out about 400 words at halftime.
Then in the second half the wheels came off the bus and it ended up being a game decided on a buzzer-beater. That 400 words I wrote at halftime turned into a single graph buried near the end pretty quick.
Of course now I cover D3 and high school hoops so with the exception of my twitter followers I go into writing with the assumption that my readers do NOT know what happened before they pick up the paper in the morning. It does change how I write.

 

It depends on a lot of factors.

Am I going to have to file a running story? If so, on the assumption that I'm writing a 16-inch gamer, I probably have 12 inches that just needs to be tweaked a bit before filing.

These days, I get the sense that people just file a few graphs for the website and then write through.

There were afternoon games that I covered where I wouldn't even touch my laptop during the game. Truth be told, I usually wrote my best gamers when I didn't have to write anything during the game. But, if you're covering a team that plays 36 games during the regular season, you might be lucky to have 4-5 games like that all year and maybe only 1-2 of them would be a significant game.

 

Okay, to use a cross thread here about the Kentucky article, when do you get to know these assistant coaches that you never would normally interview during most games? Just so in the case of there being recruiting fraud rumors so you can report it?

 

Once again, how is a running gamer different from a regular one? Sorry, I just don't fully understand it and am trying to learn more.

 

Running gamers have to be filed at the buzzer. The game ends, you plug in the final score, file and then run do postgame and write through...

 

So then there's no quotes in running gamers obviously, right? Is it a play-by-play thing?

 

Right. I would running stories are a combination of color, background and play-by-play. Obviously your final story should not resemble it on any level.

I worked at one place where we were practically forced to completely delete our running story when filing for the final edition.

People bitched and moaned about it, but it was a really good policy. We had too many people who would just plug quotes into their running, and then file for the final.

 

A good way to fill out the bottom of a running story is with old leftover quotes or pregame stuff.

Even if it's just boring "Joe Shmo has been having a great season yada yada yada.." it is more interesting than play-by-play from the first half.

When I was covering baseball, I did this a lot. You always talk to the manager before the game, and if you get a couple quotes about the starting pitcher, you can easily eat up 3-4 grafs of your running story.