Good Sports

It's spring, and young Harvardians' thoughts turn to crew and lacrosse--or so those of us in The Crimson Sports Department would like to think.

But, as everyone knows, they don't. Whether women's lacrosse superstar Liz Berkery tallies two goals and four assists or four goals and two assists matters not a whit compared to whether Yeltsin's going to push the button. If Liz scores a hat trick, the world keeps on turning. If Boris pushes the button, it doesn't.

That's why sports news is looked down upon as the lowliest of the news divisions: sports aren't real. After a standard 11-hour day cloistered in our tiny office, we often wonder whether anyone out there cares. Then we get the complaints. It's axiomatic that when money or time is being allocated not everybody will be happy, but for a community as small as ours we've got an awful lot of armchair editors.

The most common complaint--and one that has just been re-lodged against us by Radcliffe crew--is that we think men's sports are more important than women's sports and direct our resources accordingly. The corollary to this is the gripe that we don't cover smaller sports such as skiing and fencing.

So let me explain how we decide what to cover. As a general rule, order our coverage in a hierarchy roughly paralleling the athletic department's own, combined with our feeling about which sports are more popular on campus and the relative importance of various events.

In a perfect world these rules would still mean that every sport would be covered. But the Crimson has just eight full-time writers (and one photographer) complemented by seven part-timers pitching in whenever they can. Together, we put out a sports page six times per week. The net result is similar to making up a king-sized bed with a queen-sized sheet. We can't quite cover it all.

Enter the decision-making process. Without the resources to cover that entire bed, is it the head or the feet which get priority? Left side or right side? We do not strive for equal coverage of all sports. We do not strive for perfect gender equality. Men's hockey gets more coverage than women's hockey, which gets more coverage than wrestling.

Less formal factors also influence our coverage. The fact that our entire staff wants to cover baseball. The general disinterest in track. People can't write on this day or that day. Upcoming midterms. Papers are due. The parents are in town.

We are dedicated sports journalists, but reality takes its toll. So when we goof, as we did with the crew coverage last week, know that it had nothing to do with gender bias and everything to do with being human. The Radcliffe crew is right that our Sunday crew article was slanted towards the men's races. We regret it.

But here's what actually happened: We initially planned to have two reporters do the crew stories. The first one we reached wanted to focus on men's crew. We spent hours trying to find another reporter. An hour before deadline and still without a second reporter, we told the first writer to include the women. The reporter reached the varsity heavyweight coxswain, who delivered a cogent account of her boat's race. We couldn't reach any other rowers in time, and the story went to print.

The actual no-holds-barred miss (such as the complete omission of the San Diego Crew Classic last week, nostra culpa) is usually just that--a miss. An error. Something that, up against deadline, we overlooked. A failure to communicate between a reporter and an editor. A whole team that's out at a party and can't be reached. If I'm sick with the flu and Tarek has three big papers due, quality control will slip a little bit.

One thing no letter writer fails to accuse us of is hypocrisy. How, the incensed writer asks, can we rant and rave about equal funding for sports on the editorial page but then provide such unequal coverage on the sports page? Similarly, some read our staff editorials and assume that our news coverage reflects our editorial positions.

Most of us in the building find readers' confusion on this point difficult to understand. Page One is news. Always. Page Two is opinion. Always. Page Eight is sports. Always. While our staff editorial stance reflects what our editors think (and anyone from a photo editor to a business editor can and does attend staff editorial meetings) what appears on page two has absolutely no connection to how we report the news. Period.

The sports page is not a carefully crafted conspiracy. We are a small pedal-to-the-metal staff of humans, after all. Even though our job is specifically to prevent mistakes from happening, Tarek and I aren't perfect either. Like lacrosse goalies, we handle shot after shot, but that odd one will sneak by us. The readers have set a high goal for us--to be perfect. And we do our damnedest to reach that goal.