Editor’s desk: When it comes to local sports, we’ve got you covered

Published 7:15 am Saturday, February 24, 2024

It’s nearing playoff season in prep basketball, and prep wrestling programs — boys and girls — are wrapping up for the year at state championships. Prep swimming just ended with a statewide bang, too.

For readers of the Rogue Valley Times who follow all this, it’s one of the best times of the year.

All these stories come together through the hard work of Times Sports Editor Kris Henry and Times sports reporter Joe Zochert — the duo that burns the midnight oil to file their stories and send them to our website and to social media. In fact, sports stories are some of our most popular items on social media each week, collectively generating hundreds of likes, comments and shares.

When the newsroom wraps up its workday, usually close to 5 or 6 p.m. each weekday, the sports staff is almost always just getting started, setting up at venues across the region and assigning our photographers to be on scene to capture images that will make scrapbooks come alive for years, if not for a lifetime.

On weekends, it’s not uncommon for our two sportswriters and photographers to cover multiple games all day and well into the late-night hours, sometimes finishing their work when a lot of people have tucked in for the evening.

That’s why we always give sports stories a strong “overnight” play on our website, so people who are interested in following local sports can wake up and read about how their teams did the night before. Some readers will stay up just to see what happened, and we applaud that.

Our print sports section is almost entirely local, and it gives us a chance to not only highlight the great writing of our Times’ sportswriters, but to share incredible sports images captured by our photographers. Sports is mainly handled by Times photographer Andy Atkinson, but stringer Denise Baratta also fills in when we need a game covered (Note: I’ve known both for more than 30 years, and they are the best. We’re lucky.) 

We have a great mix of stories each day on our website and the Times app, and we also have a strong print product that offers variety three days a week — from hard news to entertainment-related features, investigative reporting to the important local sports stories mentioned here. We also have a great partnership with Southern Oregon University that allows us to provide recaps of all the collegiate sports going on locally and out of town, from men’s and women’s basketball to softball at this time of year.

When spring comes, it will be prep baseball, softball, track & field, cross-country and tennis, and when the chill winds of fall arrive, we’ll be covering football, volleyball and soccer.

We’re proud of the effort, and we hope our readers enjoy being able to follow and root for their local teams. If you are interested in local sports but don’t have a subscription to the Times, we invite you to sign up at http://rv-times.com/subscribe or by calling us at 800-781-3214.

— Troy Heie, editor