Sports Reporting with Brian Legree

Photograph Source:

Tim Gouw, Pexels.

Covering sports is something I really wanted to do when coming into the Journalism program. When Brian Legree, the Program Coordinator came into our reporting lecture to teach us about sports reporting, my interest in covering sports was peaked further.

The most important things I learned during this lecture was to keep the focus on the people, which applies to all news. To not only focus on the field, off the field is just as important, and finally learning that sports is just a backdrop, find the REAL story.

I didn’t realize before hand that I would have to keep the focus on the people. I thought sports stories were focused on sports. It seemed simple enough. Early on in the lecture I learned that people are the main focus of all good news stories.

When writing, you have to find a good human connection to help your audience better connect with your story. Not only will this give a human connection, but with a sports story, it will give the story an interesting perspective rather than giving a play by play of the event.

I also learned that whats happening off the field is just as important as whats happening on field.

Obviously focusing on a person gives the human connection and counts as something off the field but more so, the business, politics and the handling of the team are the intended off field ideas.

Covering how a team acted before and after their game, where they stand and what the business and politics of their team looks like is just as important and a good story idea.

Learning that sports is just a backdrop was something that made me realize what sports stories are really for, finding the REAL story, like other news stories.

Brian showed us this story which explains the story of a standout player on the women’s volleyball team. Rather than talk about the sport, the story is about how her parents are both college alumni. I relate to this story completely because it’s the same for my family. My parents also met at the college, so this makes it full circle for their story. The angle used in this story was smart and interesting, while using sports as the background.

I enjoyed this lecture as it opened my eyes to different perspectives and angles you can use to take on sports coverage.