New Bulletin feature adds to sports coverage

Many Bulletin readers enjoy getting the print edition mailed to their home every Wednesday, but an increasing number also look to us online at swcbulletin.com throughout the week for daily news and sports updates.

One area in which we provide more local information than any other news source is south Washington County high school sports. With a vibrant athletic community—a district with three high schools in addition to private and charter schools fielding sports teams—there are dozens of squads and hundreds of student-athletes to cover throughout the year. I’m proud of the work by our sports editor, Patrick Johnson, and others every week capturing those stories.

As more and more people look to us for online coverage, we’ve been working on new ways to expand our local sports coverage on the Web. Last year we added an online feature called Scoreboard. The idea was simple: while we provide full game stories from local events, but sometimes readers just want scores and stats. It was well-received, and we resumed Scoreboard when this fall season kicked off.

We also added a new online sports feature when the 2012-13 school year got under way a few weeks ago. It’s called Bulletin Game of the Week. With so many local teams competing, we thought it’d be fun to take a look ahead and highlight just one game, match or meet each week. It’s the one we think will prove to be the big event of the week. We’ll usually feature Park or East Ridge, both of which have a loyal following in south Washington County.

“We’re pretty lucky in this area to have a lot of very competitive teams and rivalries,” Johnson said in explaining the new Web feature. “I try to mix it up and pick interesting matchups or events that everyone may not know much about or realize the gravity of. There are a lot of options to choose from.”

Often, but not always, the feature will include an intra-district rivalry. For instance, there was Park boys soccer against Woodbury. (The Wolfpack pulled out a win.) Another week we highlighted a girls soccer matchup between East Ridge and Woodbury.

We’ll tell you who’s playing in the highlighted game and when, and provide a little background on what makes the game stand out that week. We’ll follow it up with results from the game online and in print.

If it proves popular with readers, we’ll continue the feature into the winter and spring seasons.

We hope you’ll check it out before you head out to cheer on your favorite team.

Tags: updates, opinion, viewpoint