I use this week's column to address a perennial complaint levied at The Cavalier Daily: coverage of the swim and dive team. The season has just begun, and, sadly, the first criticism is already in.
Last week, I received an irate letter from a reader disappointed that the Sports department neglected to cover the team's Oct. 26 home meet against South Carolina. There's no question the meet should have been covered. It's especially unfortunate that the meet fell through the cracks because the team has so few meets at home, and the paper generally doesn't cover away meets.
I am told the home meet fell by the wayside as a result of miscommunication between editors and the writer responsible for covering the swim team. The paper did not intend to ignore the meet, but that doesn't make the lack of coverage any more acceptable. The sports department does plan to cover the remaining home meets, of which there are only three.
In addition to planning to cover the meet, the editors had planned a preview of it to run the week before, but the sports writer was not able to contact the coach or team members for interviews. Sports department policy, I am told, requires all full-length stories to include comment from at least two sources. This is a sound policy. Without quotes, short items announcing a game or a meet can run in the sports in brief section. The paper did run an announcement of the meet in the briefs section on Oct. 25.
The reader was upset also that a preview of the team's home meet against Duke, which ran Friday, had the meet's start time wrong. The meet's time had been changed, and the paper wasn't alerted until after the story had been edited and moved into the layout process. But the time should have been changed immediately.
The reader's third concern was that the Duke preview led readers to believe that the Duke meet was the team's first meet, when in fact it was the second. Although the story specified that the Duke meet was the team's first conference meet, the headline simply read: Virginia swimming hosts Duke in the season's first dual meet. Another lesson in the importance of accurate headlines.
While I'm on the topic of sports coverage, I'd like to point out the constraints under which the department operates. Currently, the staff is in a coverage crunch, as the fall sports season winds down and the winter sports begin. Throughout the course of the year, the newspaper covers 18 sports. Of those, the department is now covering 10: men's and women's tennis, women's crew, track and field, field hockey, football, men's and women's soccer, women's volleyball, and swim and dive. Waiting in the wings are wrestling and basketball. Plus the sports writers, who are students, are taking their midterms.
I'm not making excuses for the staff, but I do want to point out just how much they are juggling.
Although the sports department should make every effort to cover all home games and meets of every team, it is understandable that coverage of sports such as swimming and diving may be trimmer than football and basketball when it comes to away games and meets. This is a matter of money, of the fact that the writers do have academic duties, and of sport popularity among readers. The sports department would be remiss not to travel with the football and basketball teams. They are the big-ticket sports at the University, and they are the most popular among readers. While it would be nice to be able to cover every sport in every game or meet, The Cavalier Daily doesn't have the resources to do so. Students can't take time off to travel every other weekend, and the paper can't afford to send them to every out-of-state event. They must operate within their means.
Last week's negligence notwithstanding, I think they're doing a decent job, both in coverage and in quality of writing. The sports section consistently wins Virginia Press Association awards, where the paper competes against small-circulation professional dailies, not against other college papers. A review of last week's sports pages finds coverage of at least three different sports a day, and nine sports altogether.
What do you think? I've received precious few letters the last two weeks, so write and tell me how The Cavalier Daily measures up.
(Masha Herbst can be reached at ombud@
cavalierdaily.com.)
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