The Southwest Wake News: how it'll affect our coverage

I've already been receiving e-mails from people who are excited about the Southwest Wake News, the other newspaper we will be producing in addition to The Cary News.

People from Cary, Green Hope and Panther Creek are excited they won't have to share the sports page with Apex and Holly Springs, and vice versa. People from Fuquay-Varina are just pumped they'll get covered.

Now, I hate to be the buzz-kill here, but little is going to change with how we do things. Due to limited resources — it's not like we hired someone else to focus on one paper or the other — my same stringers and I will be attending the same amount of events per week.

We'll also still be covering the same teams each week, only we're adding Fuquay-Varina to the fold as that town will now receive the Southwest Wake News. We're not subtracting any team from either page, and here's why.

For one, we do not have a full-time layout person. So while Amber Keister is incredible at what she does each week with our layout, she just might go crazy (and she'd certainly work more than part-time hours) if she had to assemble two entirely different papers from front-to-back in the same week.

So then, sports is not going to change on either front. For now at least. That's a good thing if you liked the coverage beforehand, but a bad thing if you were expecting drastic change. 

This job is a delicate balance, more than most realize. Since we come out on Monday and our deadlines are on Tuesday, anything that happens Monday or Tuesday night would have to go in the next week's paper. I have strong feelings about that subject. I don't want to open my paper on Wednesday to see something that happened last Tuesday. That's about as untimely as news can get and just like any journalist, I'm anti-old news.

If you've been coming to the website regularly, you've probably noticed that sometimes I'll go to a game on Tuesday or Monday night and post it online. It's a web-only story, but it's better than no story at all.

That leaves the days of Wednesday through Sunday to work with for sporting events. Nothing ever happens on Sunday, and few things happen on Saturday. Even if I don't cover a single Saturday story, I have to choose which 4-6 stories to cover (5 stories is the norm with the space sports is given) from about 20-25 athletic events.

There are now 10 teams with boys' and girls' basketball. They play most often on Friday. That's 20 games at minimum. Add that to the nine wrestling programs who typically wrestle on Wednesday and Saturday and that's 18 more events.

So I have to make some cutbacks, like not covering swimming or indoor track or gymnastics until conference, regional and state competitions. That was done mostly because the regular seasons for those three sports is significantly decreased. If you're a swimmer and you've swam a regional qualifying time, you'll be in that regional even if you never swim that fast again. Therefore, we will pick up those sports when there are championships on the line.

I also have to "spread the coverage around." That means even though some teams are just downright awful (bless their hearts), they can count on being in the paper at least once (I aim for twice) during their regular season. I've had complaints that Apex's girls' basketball team wasn't getting covered while we covered Cary Academy and others ad nausem. That accusation was false, of course. Until this week, the most we had covered any girls' team was twice. Apex had been covered once.

While keeping this in mind, I still can't ignore the big stories. If the folks in Apex had been just a little more patient, they'd know we can't help but cover tonight's big game against Athens Drive. Both teams are among the best in the state. Even while I've wanted to cover Panther Creek's girls team (because we hadn't yet), I had to focus more on the boys' team because they were (and still are) No. 1 in the state and often played other top-10 teams in the area. We're not going to ignore a No. 1 Panther Creek team taking on a No. 5 Athens Drive team just because we haven't covered a certain team in awhile. What good are we as a section if we miss a game like that?

I also have a few premonitions about putting a boys' and girls' game between the same schools in the paper the same week. It's somewhat stagnant to have two stories on the same page about the same schools, and it can even be confusing if the headlines are close together. We've only done this once this year, with the big Cary Academy-Cary Christian rivalry and will do it this week out of necessity with Apex and Athens Drive (both the boys' and girls' games are the most important in their respective conferences and it's not even close). I expect you'll see this a few times during baseball/softball season as well.

Thanks for reading this. Hopefully it'll clear up any concerns or questions you might have had with the expansion or how sports is operated. Keep reading The Cary News for coverage of your local teams, or start reading Southwest Wake Weekly for coverage of your local teams — whichever one you will fall under.

Please contact me if you have any other questions you need answered (or if you just want to thank me for writing this novel of explanation.. my hand is starting to cramp and I could use the pick-me-up). 

 PS- If you're a weekly reader of this blog, hopefully you're a fan of the TCN rankings for boys' and girls' basketball. We're going to keep that going, this time 10 teams strong, and call it the TCN/SWW rankings. It'll still be tagged as TCN rankings.