Running Football Tab Thread

Rosters.

You got five teams to cover? Fine.

You got 48 teams to cover? I don't think so.

 

True dat.

 

We do a 44-page tab every year covering 42 schools. We don't do rosters, but run head shots of five or six players to watch with each team's story, plus schedule and notes ... it seems to please a lot of people because the number of pages has gone up ... and as for the ad people, they must be doing their job. One school buys two tab pages of 1x2 ads and a bunch of others buy between 6 and 10 ads.

 

cover 7 county high schools (1 main one that gets more than others) and went from a 16-20 pages tabloid before i got to my present stop (and kept it tab the 1st season) to a 14 page broadsheet the last two years. made for an easier job design- and story-wise because i had more room to play with.

 

I discovered this tab from last year from the Yakima Herald Republic and still am speechless whenever I look at it ...

http://www.yakimaherald.com/sections/football2005/index.html

I'm probably going to use the basic design tools as a template for my section this year. I'm trying to get a tab for the first time in a long time. Hopefully the ads peeps can get off their dead asses and actually sell an ad or two.

 

Wow, so that's what a football tab can look like when you get color inside and not just for the cover. Never knew.

Update: We were given approval for a tab this fall, but we're lucky we got it. Ad side will need to step up and sell more than nine ads this year.

 

That is the best football tab I've seen in a long, long time. Loved the theme, loved the feature shots. Great packaging.

 

That is nice. I'd love it if we did something like that.
We have to do generic covers - by order of the Pub. - for fear of pissing off school-aligned advertisers.
Our tab is a pretty big project.
The lkast few years have been 160 pages. We cover 26 high schools, four D-I colleges, a I-AA and a D-III divided between a six-man staff.
We do the standard stuff every year: staged action photos, short team profile, rosters, schedule, season preview and sidebar-feature.
Same thing every year.  We won an award for our work a few years ago, but we didn't do anything new - just more of it.
I'd love to break the mold.
Like a lot of you guys, we take our own pictures. We also take head shots of ALL fall sports athletes so we can use them during the season for athletes of the week ad segment.

Its a caffeine-induced rush of madness.


I wouldn't have it any other way!

 

It's an impressive work, I'll say that much. Though I think maybe they carried the theme a little too far (materials? workload? blueprints?). Too much of that gets a touch cheesy. Otherwise, a much more far-reaching preview section than anything I'll be coming up with for my tab.

 

I liked how they did the schedules.


Read across for each team's schedule. Read down and you get the schedule for the week.

 

Wow, that's an impressive tab. The best one I've seen.

I like the schedules, too. The stadium guide is an impressive graphic. Perhaps my favorite part, though, was that they didn't jump a single story. That allows the reader to go from one page to the next and not miss a thing.

They did carry the theme pretty far, but I think in this case, you have to. I think that with a theme like this, you either go all out like they did, or don't do it at all. They went all out and did a great job with it.

Whoever posted that link, thank you. There are some helpful idea that I'll try to incorporate in our tab this year.

 

That's really, really nice work. I like the theme (it's kind of macho...plus, you know telling advertisers "The football tab has a construction theme" led to some more hardware stores, Realtors and repair companies getting onboard.)