If you had two staff and one stringer, how would you...

Yeah. Each stringer could make two or three stories out of phone calls from coaches etc... You could have something decent for each sport, plus scores and briefs for other games in those sports and then art from the main package.

 

I'm trying to figure out how to cover spring sports from a JUCO, a 6A school and 12 1-3A schools by myself. No stringers or part-timers.
It'll be fun.....and I might die.

 

I agree. We never have two deskers on game night. We're a staff of three, and it's usually one person on desk taking calls (we have seven 5A area high schools) and two others covering games, as well as a stringer who specifically does girls sports coverage.

When I was a one-man department at the weekly at my prior job, I covered games Tuesdays and Fridays, and had 2-3 features/roundups by just making phone calls and talking to whatever sources I needed.

 

Like others have said, the key is to maximize your scheduling.

If you have a big track meet with 7-8 local teams, hit that, focus on the top local team, but also mention the other seven. And you can count that as an event covered for that school.

Watch the standings and look for big games between teams with close records. Those are better to cover than having a 10-1 team beat the shit out of a 2-12 team.

Depending on what you cover and space, you might be able to get two game stories per day. I would ALWAYS keep one man on the phones during the spring, since it's pretty heavy then.


Oh, and one more thing, try to have a feature or two in the bank, ready to go. You never know when you might need something with the unpredictable spring weather and rainouts.

 

If you're dealing with a large amount of call-ins, you're going to need those staffers to get back to the office ASAP. Send them to close, early events. Do gamers. Make them short. And when it rains, ask to rearrange schedules if the staffers are up for it. There's no sense in having three people in the office when there's little to do.

 

Art is the great cure-all. We (claim to) cover 31 area high schools and a JUCO national power with a SE, two staffers, two part-timers and an equivalent of two in-area correspondents. Quite often in spring, we'll send a photog out to an event and run an expanded (6-10") call with secondary art. It minimizes the impact on our staff on days when we're working on features/enterprise, and in the eyes of the bulk of our readership, art equates to great coverage.

 

Great point. It's amazing how happy a photo makes readers. See if you can get your photographer to hop around to several events you're taking call-ins for. It will go a long way toward pleasing your readers.