Last week Michael Salmonowicz wrote a letter to the editor begging an answer to the question why The Cavalier Daily's sports section ignores excellence and rewards mediocrity.
Salmonowicz referred to the seemingly insufficient coverage of the women's basketball team in comparison to its male counterpart, which seems to be a valid question-- as of Monday night, Debbie Ryan's squad stood at 20-8 (8-4 ACC) while the men had tallied a mark of 13-12 (3-9 ACC).
Each week in the winter season, the Sports section devotes its Gameday page to a men's basketball game. Even when the women's team was slated to face off against then-No. 3 North Carolina two weeks ago, the page instead previewed the men's games against Boston College and Georgia Tech -- two opponents with sub-.500 conference records.
In the words of Salmonowicz, "these three teams [Virginia, Boston College and Georgia Tech] will need a miracle to make the NCAA Tournament, and might not even be invited to the NIT."
Compare that to the women's matchup with the Tar Heels -- a game that featured two teams with a then-combined overall record of 40-8, and both highly likely to qualify for the NCAA Tournament.
And though Salmonowicz has a legitimate point, the answer to his question isn't all that straightforward.
The reason for this hinges on the fact that, for a newspaper, practicality trumps fairness: The question of "what will people read" often replaces the question of "what stories deserve coverage." In this sense, there is a direct correlation between the coverage afforded to a sport and its perceived degree of popularity.
And so the ostensible role of the sports page seems fairly straightforward: Print stories that will be read by the greatest number of people.
It's an assumption, though, that I don't wholly agree with. If the function of the media is to tell the public "what's news," then it doesn't follow that the students' perceived opinions dictate what gets put above the fold.
It is for this reason that I agree with Salmonowicz. Football and men's basketball should not be given an automatic spot each day as the lead story or have the designated Gameday slot week in and week out. Rather, the coverage afforded to each team should be a function of how newsworthy it is. It sounds obvious, but it isn't always the way it is. Determining which stories or teams deserve more coverage is a process that considers both relative importance and relative popularity, not just the latter.
In many cases, the lead stories will be previews of football or men's basketball games. But this shouldn't be the everyday presumption. In circumstances such as this year, when the women's basketball team has put together the kind of season that it has, it deserves to have the spotlight when it goes up against the third-ranked team in the country. I find it hard to believe that a men's basketball game six days away against a team with sub-.500 ACC record takes precedence.
Perhaps the greatest misconception with this proposed idea of coverage is that it promotes jumping on and off the bandwagon. A team gets hot? Cover them. They start losing? Write about someone else. But this isn't at all the way it works. Instead, the question that should be answered is what story is most important. In some cases it may be a struggling men's basketball team, depending on the circumstance.
At the heart of the matter, though, is changing the way we look at the sports page. Rather seeing it as a template where each team has its designated spot on the layout, it should be seen as a constantly changing source of news, where the most impressive feats or crucial games are the ones that are highlighted.
And though I am a bigger men's basketball fan than women's -- a statement that probably holds true for a lot of fans around the University -- that shouldn't be the sole barometer for measuring which teams get more coverage. Once the contributors of the sports page realize that (myself included), we'll have transformed the page from a reflection of student interest into a source of news.
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