Behind the Headlines

Kentuckians love their basketball. That passion is never more evident than during March Marchness when tournaments get underway. Fans are buzzing and teams are playing around the state at every level — from preps to small colleges to major colleges.

The Herald-Leader sports staff must juggle resources and news space among all the schools in our coverage area. Like any tournament, we must change as the brackets unfold each night. It is our most challenging, and exciting, time of year. We deal with the deadline rush of daily tournament games while at the same time cranking out special sections. We provide a live special section on the NCAA tournament — a section that is produced in fewer than six hours. 

Once the tournaments start, we must decide how to divide our people among the various tournaments and sites. UK is naturally a priority. Another factor may be a school’s proximity, and if it is in our circulation area. We do a special boys’ Sweet 16 section the Wednesday the tournament starts in Lexington.  It is only four days ahead of that when we know who the tournament teams will be.  We also do special coverage advancing the girls’ Sweet 16 in Bowling Green. A welcome challenge this year is the UK women. Their success means we will dedicate a writer to follow them – a writer who in the past would have been helping cover another tournament.  We don’t get extra people with new teams, we just move our staff members around to try to best meet readers’ needs and be fair to the teams.

Readers see our writers’ bylines, but that is only part of the story. We have a staff of page designers, copy editors and headline writers who work well into the early morning hours to put together each day’s Sports section. It all makes for a hectic, chaotic and somewhat stressful month. It is our version of Madness – but one we enjoy, because we know you are reading closely.

Gene Abell
Sports Editor