A few days ago, Zac from Delayed Offsides wrote about his first season covering college hockey for the Something’s Bruin/Sieves The Day group. Among his excellent musings, he spoke about reporting on hockey from the view of someone who had played previously, which he has. Zac mentioned that as a hockey player himself, he relies less on stats, and more about watching the plays develop.
As of late, I’ve been thinking about the same topic. I was using it as a potential reason why I have been struggling with such debilitating writers block. I never had the chance to play hockey or lacrosse myself – they weren’t offered at my school, and youth programs for girls in both sports were still rare when I was young. When you have less knowledge of being on the ice or field, you tend to use stats almost as a crutch – as your main tool of evaluation because you don’t have that first hand experience to fall back to.
I may watch an entire game intently, but I immediately turn to the stat sheet when I start to write a game story. Because I haven’t played first hand, I always have that worry in the back of my mind that if I try to describe what I just saw, I am not doing the game justice or could be explaining things incorrectly. What can I interpret without the first hand experience? Stats.
Readers yearn to read that first hand experience. I am one of many hockey fans who eagerly await pieces by Jason Bourne, a former college and pro player turned excellent writer for Yahoo Sports’ Puck Daddy, among other sites. And one of my lacrosse writing idols and someone that I have been lucky enough to have as a mentor, Andrew McKay of The Laxist, skillfully weaves in his own experience scouting and working within the game into his coverage. Unfortunately, the number of former high level athletes in both sports who are great writers are few. Having the written perspective of a former athlete, which fans desire because of its behind-the-scenes nature, is rare.
But that isn’t to say that if you haven’t played the game, you can’t report. The majority of sports writers haven’t played the game they cover. For many of us, we write because our siblings and cousins played the game(s), and we desired to participate in a way in which our talents provided us. Or it’s because the stories we read in the sports section of the newspaper captured our imaginations much more than any political analysis on page A3 did. Or maybe we played, but were too short, too slow or not able to afford further training to advance.
As writers who haven’t played, how can we step back and capture the game’s action and finesse without years of first-hand knowledge? If you have the ability, ask the athletes about the movement and tempo of the game. Use the athlete’s description of their play to guide how you write about it – the act of it is far more interesting than the fact that it was their 24th goal of the season. Ask teammates what they saw of certain plays while on the bench. Watch practices and the drills run, then find out what those exercises are for.
Use the age-old tenant of all writing that was imparted on me the first day of creative writing in seventh grade: Show, don’t tell. Is the team skating with speed, or through molasses? Are the teammates and coaches on the sidelines yelling at teammates in frustration? Are lines being changed mid-game? Is someone getting a lot of shots, but just not being able to convert them? Don’t be afraid to say what you see. Move past what a reader can get in a box score, and describe the game to someone who didn’t have the opportunity to sit next to you.