The incredibly shrinking basketball tab

Just like during football season, my hoops tab just got slashed by four pages at the last possible moment (and some color pages were taken away as well) ...

So how does one go about previewing 12 teams (six schools with six boys teams, six girls teams) in a 12-page tab that is 50 percent ads?

Schedules, rosters, capsules on each team, a few photos and that's about it ... So much for my grand ideas that I had been kicking around the past few months ... arrgg...

 

Don't try and preview every team in painstaking detail.

Run the capsules, either some file footage of last year or some scrimmages of early-season stuff (perhaps both ... depends on deadline for the tab), roster, skeds and such. But run a main theme prevailing in your coverage area, a high school basketball trend piece or something along those lines. Dump the paint-by-numbers junk if your main story - or two - needs a few more words to drive home your point.

Newshole cuts don't always mean the product suffers. Sometimes it's addition by subtraction because it can force people to think about how best to budget the space instead of doing the same formulaic crap.

 

I'd have killed for a 14 page basketball tab as opposed to the 20 I got. Mainly because I have unreliable stringers that can't follow directions. They turned in their stories the day they were due and they were all way to short.
But they're the only help I have right now so I have to just yell at them and move on. Can't fire them......yet.

 

rosters and schedules? don't forget the team pictures.

 

I didn't do the rosters but I did pics and schedules. Still had to use graphics of the teams logo to fill.

 

Be grateful you got a tab; some of us have to cram our previews into the regular section. :'(

 

Thanks for the input friends. Here are some of my thoughts now on what to include:

The basics: schedules, rosters, 2006-07 rewind (last year's record and post-season achievements) and capsules on each team (who's back, who's missing, who's ready to make an impact, blah blah)
March to Madness (or some other clever name): something to highlight the big games and key dates on the schedule
Ten to watch: Kind of like a preseason all-area team, highlighting the top players going into the season
Boys preview story, Girls preview story: Something that covers all the teams in my coverage area in a broad stroke with big storylines, expectations, coaching changes, etc. Will probably stick the capsules in this package somewhere...

Since I've only got about six workable pages once you factor in the cover, ads, etc. I don't know that I'll have room for much more ... I had a few other features in mind (school opens new gym, player from last year who promised "we will be back" after losing in state title game in March, etc.) that I'll just include in my regular section -- mostly since teams are already playing games and we've had to move our deadline out to early December because of other issues... Plus that kid who promised "we will be back" - well, his team lost by 27 in its season opener ... yikes...

Thoughts?

 

yeah. i was told that advertising couldn't sell a basketball tab. lazy fucks.

 

basketball tab??? what is that?

 

We had a four-page wrap. Capsules for all 16 teams (8 boys, 8 girls), with a mugshot of a player in each capsule. We ran the schedule at the bottom of the capsule and we had a feature and a column. Worked out well.

But tough to do something real creative you wanted to do when you get slashed like that.

 

I feel your pain. I had a 8-page tab for 12 teams. Three of the eight pages have half page ads, four others have quarter page ads. I did a Reader's Digest version of a tab.

 

I just finished doing previews and what we decided to do is one whole story on boys and one on girls for the last issue. Basically, I previewed each school based on what coached gave me. Then I decided the single most important thing or a couple of things people need to know about the team. Also if the coach gave a colourful quote I added it too. More people like reading something like this. We have already received positive feedback from readers on it.

Next month, we are actually doing player profiles (well, I am), so we broke it up this way.