The Modern Journalist

ESPN Get Local with Sports

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I’ve been discussing high school sports coverage with various reporter friends, which is one areas that local papers should really knock it out of the park.

The simplest solution is to set up a fantasy-type system — and a predictive market system — for local teams, then make sure that there were enough folks working on the system to gather, input and track information. Clearly you couldn’t get every team — high school sports are too unpredictable — but for the major schools, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility.

As long as your gathering statistics — say once per week — you could update what was happening and then run the fantasy and predictive markets. It’s not real time, obviously, but it would create an interest and buzz around the sports.

In a town like Cincinnati where women’s volleyball, football and baseball are so much a part of the social fabric, I don’t think it would be nuts to pull something off.

The problem: it’s not happening and now ESPN has decided to go whole hog into the game.

ESPN has increased its high school football and basketball coverage in the past few years, including top prep teams in nationally televised challenges.

Add to that the proliferation of AAU basketball seasons and All-Star prep football, and it’s pretty clear that ESPN could put together a wicked cool, national high school network similar to what I’m describing, which will almost certainly undercut whatever gets done locally.

That doesn’t mean local papers can’t catch up. After all, ESPN has just announced its intention to launch this network. There is still time. There’s always time.

If local papers get how this should be put together.