News writing style is just as important for sports reporting as it is for general news, business stories, or any other journalistic work.
The advantage of sports writing is that you are allowed a little more freedom in your choice of words. In criminal or business writing, you are restricted from using adjectives and adverbs and are encouraged to focus more on nouns and verbs.
Sports writing, however, lets you go to town when describing the plays, atmosphere, fans, and other colorful aspects of a sporting event.
For this article, we will take a step-by-step look at how to write a simple sports report using quotes.
Ideally, any sports story would have quotes from the winners and losers. In fact, many sports articles are written about what athletes say and not about what they have achieved on the field of play.
However, you also have sports articles written without quotes. When newbies learn to write like a journalist, especially in sports, they’re likely to come across the structure we’ll show you here.
We will adapt the NBA game between the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers on April 1 as our example article.
1. Introduction: The most important news aspect of a sports game is the score. Who won? How did they win and what effect did the victory have? It’s also important if we’re writing from a Boston or a Cleveland perspective. In this case, we’ll go with Cleveland.
“Cleveland Cavaliers lost 98-96 to the Boston Celtics after Delonte West hit two free throws in the closing seconds, falling 3 1/2 games behind the Pistons for the best record in the Eastern Conference.”
2. More information: The above is enough for those who have a passing interest in the sport. However, NBA fans would want more information and you could give it to them in a paragraph or two.
“The Cavaliers were without star player LeBron James, who was suffering from a knee injury, while the Celtics were without Paul Pierce. Gerald Green led the way for the Celtics with 25 points, while Kendrick Perkins had 12 points and nine rebounds.
The Cavaliers, for whom Larry Hughes scored 24 and Sasha Pavlovic scored 17, have already qualified for the playoffs while Boston is out of the running.”
3. Quote – This is where you can provide a quote from the coach or a key player from both teams. You can precede each saying with an introductory paragraph or go directly to the quote.
“Celtic striker Al Jefferson said: ‘They were losing their best player and we were losing our best play. We just stood there.’
Cavs coach Mike Brown said James’ absence was a key factor in their loss.
We miss LeBron. We miss LeBron every time he doesn’t play. He’s our guy,’ Brown said.
4. The rest: Once you know the main information and key quotes, you can continue with the description of the game. Even better would be to describe only one or two works and include more citations.
The thinking behind the sporting goods is that people would have watched the game on TV anyway and wouldn’t want a boring description of the game. Therefore, quotes from the people who matter, such as athletes and coaches, would offer better reading value.
There are many types of sports news writing offered around the world every day. We have simply shown you its simplest form. It is certainly a rewarding form of news writing for journalists who love their sport. And the structure they use allows them to adapt their skills to any type of journalistic writing.
