How do we cover sports in North Carolina if there are no live sports? It’s easy, really
The jokes came within seconds of the ACC announcing it was canceling the final three rounds of its men’s basketball tournament. The NCAA was yet to make a decision on its tournament, but it was inevitable.
One by one, anyone who wasn’t a reporter poked their head into the media room at Greensboro Coliseum using different words to ask the same thing.
“I guess you get to go on vacation.”
“What? Are you going to have to cover news now?”
“It must be nice to not have to do anything and still collect a paycheck.”
Translation: What are sports reporters going to do when there are no sports to report on?
We were all set to head down to The Masters next month, but that’s no longer happening. The NBA and NHL seasons have been suspended. NCAA spring sports are canceled. NASCAR is taking at least two weeks off. Sports at public high schools are in a holding pattern until early April.
In North Carolina, these are the main sports we care about (NFL free agency is still scheduled to begin this week), but just because there aren’t games being played doesn’t mean there aren’t still important stories to tell.
I’ve always found games to be the least interesting part of sports (insert joke here about a lack of final scores in print because of early deadlines). A team can win or it can lose — even the NHL eliminated ties 15 years ago — and while different paths will be taken to reach those results, the outcome is generally binary.
What’s fascinating are the personalities involved in sports, what athletes do outside the game. The transactions — the pitches and steps made to sign a recruit or free agent — and analyzing how that roster move will affect any given team.
A college coach’s contract, its loopholes and bonus structure. The triumph of someone overcoming odds, or the tragedy of how head trauma changes an elite athlete’s life.
The way a team takes care of its employees the way the Hornets and Hurricanes are doing for part-timers at their arenas.
These are the kinds of stories that make sports unique, and these are the stories we’ll continue to tell, regardless of whether games are played.
In addition, we’re going to look at this period “without sports” as an opportunity to try new things. The size of our printed sports section will decrease these next few weeks — we will be writing fewer stories overall — but we’re going to be testing new coverage areas and having more fun in the digital space.
Podcasts and live video/Q&As used to be priorities for us, but as we shifted our focus toward what types of content drove the most subscriptions (written analytical pieces, in-depth reporting), we started to get away from those digital-first elements that were a staple of what we did in the early 2010s. Now is our chance to have fun with those again.
Here is a taste of some of what we’ll be doing in the coming weeks:
eSports
Did you know the Charlotte Hornets just got an NBA 2K League team, Hornets Venom GT? The 2K League announced that it was going to postpone the start of its season due to coronavirus concerns but was actively looking for a solution to hold competitions remotely. Because these are video games and can be played online, the league is expected to resume, and when it does, we’ll be there to cover it.
NASCAR, in a way, is also continuing, despite actual races being put on hold. Sunday, Dale Earnhardt Jr., William Byron and Bubba Wallace competed against each other in an iRacing event, and the Observer’s motorsports reporter Alex Andrejev covered it.
More of these races, which are in-depth video game simulations, are sure to be held in the coming weeks and more drivers and celebrities (retired all-pro NFL lineman Kyle Long and country music artist Tim Dugger competed Sunday) are expected to join.
NCAA tournament that could have been
Just because the actual NCAA tournament was canceled doesn’t mean we can’t use our imaginations.
We paid respected Washington Post bracketologist Patrick Stevens to set what the 68-team field should have been and then streamed a live selection show Sunday night unveiling the bracket while our three-person panel analyzed the match ups. Throughout the next month, we’ll simulate every matchup using WhatIfSports.com — which even creates play-by-play using active rosters and stats for these hypothetical games — and report back with the results until we have our national champion that could have been.
We have a lot more planned — I don’t want to give everything away — and we hope you’ll continue to follow our sports coverage in this new temporary era. None of us like the lack of live sporting events, but as the COVID-19 disease from coronavirus continues to sweep the globe, this is our new reality.
We’ll use this as an opportunity to try new things and (hopefully) have some fun in the face of what we’re all dealing with.
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 5:55 AM.
