Follow the bouncing balls.
Since the inception of Cascadia Daily News, we’ve always been happy to include a regular milieu of sports and recreation coverage to readers. It remains a central part of our commitment to replacing — and building upon — the traditional role of a community newspaper.
We think coverage of school programs and sports, in the news and sports sections, is an important glimpse into the daily lives of local youth. Those stories, photos and videos enhance a sense of shared community, which is a large reason for our existence. We work hard to produce that on a regular basis.
Some throat clearing here: As editor, I’m fully aware that some readers have let us know through faxes and telegrams that they have little interest in sports and recreation, and would rather see us devote more time to (insert favorite subject here). That’s fine; we try to present a broad range of news content every week, hoping some of it piques the interest of the middle section of our media market.
Don’t agree or don’t like it? OK! Move on to the next section, and please know this: If we stopped covering sports tomorrow, it wouldn’t free up additional resources to devote to some other topic. It would just leave a hole in our coverage, not likely to be filled, given the realities of the modern media business.
CDN covers sports and recreation in some ways traditional, some new. But like the rest of our products, it’s constantly evolving, mostly in response to reader feedback. And even as the fate of the free world hangs in the balance through Election Day, we’re about to add some exciting new sports features, starting Sept. 3 (online).
Welcome to weekly Western sports
We’re adding even more, regular coverage of sports at Western Washington University. As a lifelong fan of collegiate sports — an interest fueled by previous career time spent covering amateur athletes at the Olympic level — I’ve always loved that living here provides easy access to high-level sports competition. And most of it comes without the hassles, expense — and increasingly, commercialized insanity — of NCAA Division I collegiate athletics.
Also, this: We’re equal opportunity sports journos here but like to give as much attention as we can to underreported girls and women’s athletics. Western fields some of the top women’s teams in the country every year, with a strong tradition that predates by decades the current new wave of interest in women’s sports.
We hope to illuminate this in two ways:
- With a new weekly WWU Sports Notebook, appearing online and in print every Friday, that keeps local folks up to speed on whatever’s on the campus athletics table. Watch for its debut Sept. 6.
- We’ll strive to provide more features and enterprise stories about collegiate athletics in our general news mix. It’s a big commitment, but we’re proud to be the only media organization giving Western athletics the coverage its athletes, fans, family and alumni members deserve — and tell us they want.
With a membership that literally spans the globe, Western alumni consistently tell us they love to keep track of Viking sports programs and athletes, and look to CDN to provide a path. We hear you.
Make way for football’s Game of the Week
At the same time, CDN is launching an exciting new partnership with local credit union WECU to feature fall high school football in a way that includes contests for entire high school student bodies. Starting next month, we’ll be providing print and visual coverage of the WECU/CDN Game of the Week — a selected Friday night matchup between schools in Whatcom and Skagit counties.
It’s a fun, participatory program that includes donations by WECU to student body associations for schools that win student-section spirit competitions — a benefit to student activities beyond just athletics. Stay tuned for more details; the first GOTW, Sept. 6, will be Lynden at Ferndale.
We’ll also add an additional new weekly feature, Prep Spotlight, which will introduce a notable prep athlete in the style of CDN’s consistently popular “Faces in the Crowd” features.
Selective coverage — by necessity
At the same time, we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done: Work as hard as we can to bring professional-level sports coverage to local youth sports and recreation. That includes both boys and girls prep sports of all kinds, through all three seasons.
With a two-county coverage area and only one full-time sports reporter, the enterprising Nicholas Zeller-Singh, we can’t dive deeply into every sport, every week. But we’ll do our best to visit all of them over the course of a season. CDN brings readers timely, award-winning coverage of several prep sports matchups every week, plus ongoing standings and profiles of athletes who are noteworthy, both on stats sheets and in other ways.
We are particularly interested in expanding the reach of that coverage through Skagit County, and open to tips on events/athletes we might be missing there.
Rec is still our rock
We’ll continue our commitment to covering recreation, with regular perspectives on outdoor and indoor rec life and culture.
As a tradeoff, in a way, for what we believe will be enhanced coverage in our weekly print and daily coverage of a broader range of student-athletes and local recreationists, CDN will stop producing its seasonal Prep Sports Preview standalone sections, which included schedules, portraits and short Q/A features with local athletes.
We enjoyed doing these and loved the exposure they brought to local youth. But we plan to plow that time and energy back into our general sports coverage, with the hope of bringing more young people onto our pages every day.
Thanks for coming along on that ride with us.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
