Section at small daily

I'm the SE at a small daily. Space is usually tight, 3-4 pages most days. Sunday section is typically 5-6 pages. Anyway, considering overhauling the section, the way we do things, the way we report, etc. We have 20 prep schools and four colleges, one of which is a semi-relevant FCS school that we devote a decent amount of coverage too. Of course, we also have access to AP. Most of our local coverage is devoted to short color features and gamers. Right now, I have just myself and another writer here on staff.
I have been thinking things over, and since this board has been a great resource to me I figured I'd see what you guys thought. What would you change, etc? Just brainstorming a bit.

 

i get overwhelmed just thinking about covering all that with just two people and a daily deadline ... i'll be interested to hear what some of the pros suggest ... not sure how effective it is to write gamers on 20 schools -- maybe stick to call-ins and roundups and focus more on the color features and other non-traditional items (local power rankings, profiles, issue stories, enterprise, etc.) ... then when the playoffs arrive, jump on board those teams that are winning and making runs -- if you have stringer money, you might considering saving a good bit of it for the post-season...

 

We don't write gamers on the 20 schools. Instead, we cover one or two games per night and take call-ins. I try to give the bad teams, and there are plenty of those, some gamer coverage early in the season because we will be covering the good teams through the playoffs. I guess I'm just looking for different ideas as to how to move forward with covering sports in alternative ways, etc.

 

I think a lot depends on how your high schools are situated. I've got 20-25, depending on which fringe schools decide to call in, but the majority of our readers are fans of one or the other of the three large in-town schools, and that's where we concentrate a lot of our attention.

Then we have 6-7 schools of various smaller size that are fairly close-in that we try to stay on top of, and the rest are fringe schools that we only cover when they do something important, like win big and go deep in the playoffs.