I noticed as I was going through the fall sports preview questions that there are a lot of first-year coaches among our core schools.

They are not necessarily new to the profession of coaching, but new to that particular school.

It will make for some challenging times for me as I try to keep them headed in the right direction when it comes to submitting information from their contests.

During the winter sports season, we shifted our focus from reporting game stories for the paper to previews and feature stories.

As social media continues to grow and dominate our landscape, especially among the younger generation, it is tougher and tougher to deliver the type of coverage that people have become accustemed to.

Heck, by the time I reach my car in the parking lot, most people already know who won the game, as well as the most significant plays from the game.

There are some media outlets that are almost doing play-by-play on Twitter.

So it was our job to figure out how to best use the space we have to provide the best coverage to our readers.

That’s why we decided that doing more previews of upcoming games and tournaments, as well as feature stories on our local athletes best suited that purpose.

In order to satisfy those who enjoy reading the statistics, we created the “Breaking Down The Numbers” section, which gives you the box score information.

For those who want to know just who had the most yards, the most kills, scored the most goals or ran the best time, we created the “Shining Stars” portion of the paper to give you a face to go along with the name and the statistics.

We haven’t forgot about game stories all together. You can find smaller stories than we used to run in the print edition online at www.leaderpub.com.

We will also be trying to expand our reach via social media.

I will be using Twitter to update scores from the events I am covering and from those our stringers are covering when possible.

We hope that you have enjoyed the changes we have made and I promise to continue to give our readers even better content during the 2014-15 season.

 

Scott Novak is sports editor at Leader Publications. He can be reached at 687-7702.