The two Virginia basketball teams this year seem to be polar opposites: The men’s team is young and struggling but led by an emerging set of underclassmen. Nothing short of a miracle will bring the men to postseason play this year.
The women’s team, on the other hand, is playing better than it has in more than a decade. With arguably the three best players in the ACC — all upperclassmen — on the roster, the Cavaliers are poised to achieve an excellent seed in the NCAA Tournament and maybe even make some noise during March Madness.
The question of the day is which of these two teams, then, deserves the more prominent coverage?
While both teams are pivotal parts of The Cavalier Daily’s winter sports coverage, it’s ultimately the women who deserve top coverage.
Led by some of the best athletes to grace our University in recent years, the future is now for the women’s team, while the men’s team is, by all accounts, rebuilding.
This is the women’s moment to shine, and we should give them their due. Barring some sort of bizarre turnaround ending, most will forget the 2008-09 men’s basketball season a decade from now, its ultimate role in the history books as part of a prologue for some hopefully great seasons in the near future.
Paul Montana, whose argument sits just to the left of this one, would have you believe that because there are more people who know Sylven Landesberg’s name than people who know Monica Wright’s name, Dave Leitao’s squad accordingly deserves more articles and bigger headlines than Debbie Ryan’s team.
This populist view of journalism — that the papers should choose what to write based primarily on what people want to read — is nice in theory but doesn’t always hold up in practice. Consider for a moment that there are more people who know Britney Spears’ name than people who know Nancy Pelosi’s name, and you’ll start to see where I’m coming from.
Some topics and events are intrinsically more newsworthy than other topics and events. A subpar men’s basketball team that might not win even 10 games is an important part of the University’s culture but does not have the ultimate impact on Virginia athletics that a women’s team with a shot at an ACC title and a long but feasible chance of making a run to the Final Four does.
I’m not trying to imply that The Cavalier Daily should be a fair-weather fan or that we should tuck men’s basketball articles to the bottom of the page. There are plenty of interesting stories to be told about the men’s team, there are readers who want to hear them and The Cavalier Daily should make it a priority to tell them.
I also will not suggest that the paper start choosing its coverage based on who has the most tallies in the win column. Just because the Virginia women’s rowing team has finished fourth or better nationally seven times in the past 11 years doesn’t mean it should get the kind of coverage that, say, Virginia’s football or baseball teams would if they pulled that feat off.
All I’m suggesting is a more holistic view, one that takes into account reader interest along with other things: each team’s success, the legacy each team will leave and, especially, the role of student journalism.
See, student-run newspapers have a special position in the coverage of college sports; no other media source will take the time to cover mid-major sports or so-called minor sports, so it’s up to these student newspapers to pick up the slack. If The Cavalier Daily does not take the time to give the women’s basketball team superior coverage and analysis, no one will. The team’s season, which has the potential to be legendary, will disappear like dust in the wind.
What happens if The Cavalier Daily takes an article or two that would normally go to the men’s team in a more competitive year, and instead covers the women’s team? Nothing bad. The men’s basketball team will get covered well by local and national media no matter what, which isn’t true of the women’s team.
Montana argues that other papers covering men’s basketball more justifies The Cavalier Daily doing the same; I say it’s irrelevant. The Charlottesville Daily Progress and Richmond Times-Dispatch are from the outside looking in. They’re concerned with determining what coverage behooves their respective communities. This paper you’re reading is a paper about the University, and it’s up to this paper to decide — independently from other newspapers — what stories University students want and should read about.
When you’re taking your kids to JPJ 15 years from now, and they ask about that big banner that says “Women’s Basketball — 2009 ACC Champions” or something along those lines, how do you want to answer?
“I’m not sure, honey, but I can tell you about our men’s basketball team that year! It finished 11th in its conference!”
Every sport has stories worth telling, and The Cavalier Daily shouldn’t miss its opportunity to tell a great one this year.
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