As most regular readers of the East Tennessean sports section have noticed, there has been a major change on the sports page this semester.
The biggest is that the East Tennessean staff writers are covering all sports at ETSU regularly.
You might say that our motto is “A Story for Every Sport.” That’s quite a feet seeing that some sports never even come close to campus.
Take for instance the men’s golf team is only in Johnson City once in the fall. But Joel Poole who covers golf has managed to keep East Tennessean readers abreast of happenings in golf.
Poole is one our new writers who has never written before and writing from 1-3 articles an issue.
Lindsey Lynch and Drew Smith are returning as writers.
Lynch is covering the volleyball beat and will share coverage for basketball starting in November. She also writes articles on the fly.
Smith is mainly on the Bucs’ baseball beat. He has been covering soccer regularly and will also be sharing the basketball beat later this fall.
As sports editor I realize not having football has totally changed this section. The biggest difference is that two football articles last year took up almost an entire page, plus we had previews too.
It’s really a feat that we have had articles from East Tennessean staff writers in every issue. That’s especially difficult when writers have to try to track down coaches and stats with heavy class loads.
On occasion we cover intramural sporting events, although mostly we put our coverage in the form of stand alone pictures.
We have enough collegiate athletes that deserve coverage that we should not have to revert to covering sports outside the college circuit.
As a sports writer myself for multiple area newspapers I know that most college athletes never get an ounce of coverage for all their hard work.
That’s one area where college newspapers come in. We can devote whole pages to college athletes where other papers cannot.
Also I want to have more pictures. We have good photography people I want to show their work off.
Besides, as college students we look at enough text everyday. We need some pictures to break the monotony and spice up the sports page.
Quintin Wise will be writing mostly opinion on national happenings. I have asked him to do this because students are interested in sports on a broader sense. He will rove for some of the writers as well. I hope to keep him doing more feature articles.
Lastly and most important to the campus sporting scene is basketball. I plan to have double coverage of every men’s game and most women’s games.
There is so much happening at our basketball games that it takes more than one perspective to write it all down.
This basketball season will be especially exciting, as ESPN will visit the campus for Bracket Buster Saturday on Feb. 19. Fresno State will show up early in the season on Nov. 27 for a show down in the Memorial Center.
A month from now the sports section will be starting to fill up with basketball articles and will remain so until March.
We also have an exciting baseball season to come right after basketball ends.
Our own Caleb Moore led the nation in hitting in NCAA Div-I baseball.
Moore broke most ETSU hitting records and he’s back again this year. Baseball coach Tony Skole has brought in some exciting recruits. So we have a lot look forward to in sports.
We will do our best to cover them for the ETSU campus. We will try to do our best to be creative as we write our stories.
I hope all will remember as they read this section we are all learning. We are not professionals although we will to act as such.

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