Pity the poor sports desk. Any sports desk, not just Stars and Stripes'. The space it has to work with is never enough, even in a relatively quiet period like now, when football is over and baseball hasn't yet officially begun.
What has begun, and requires quite a few column inches, is the runup to the NCAA college basketball tournament. Make that tournaments, plural. There's one for men and one for women. There's the rub.
Pfc. Whitney N. Monts of FOB Kalsu, Iraq, sent a letter to the editor saying Stripes was "missing out" by not covering female athletes well enough. The writer especially wants to see not just bare scores, but more stories and photos pertaining to the women's NCAA basketball events.
The Stripes sports editor, Sean Moores, says he weighs the use of space against perceived service to the most readers. He says he tries to accommodate both men's and women's basketball, but "men's college basketball is one of the most popular items in the paper and the men's NCAA tournament is one of the few events in sports that even non-sports fans like to follow." That's an understatement, considering the "March Madness" that drives millions to feverishly follow the results with their personal bracket sheets, at work and at home. The women's tournament has brackets too, though fewer people use them to avidly follow the games. Any sports desk would be committing suicide by cutting sharply into men's NCAA coverage -- for any substitute copy.
But there are places to look for space. I went through Stripes papers for all this month and found that, indeed, they have been running as much as a half-page of women's college basketball results daily. I didn't see any articles to go with those agate basketball scores. In fact, I saw only a few women's sports stories at all; they were about tennis, golf and skiiing, and they were brief.
There was no shortage of other stories about men's (non-basketball) sports -- mainly analyses and features. Maybe there's room among that lineup for the coverage Pfc. Monts and probably some other readers crave.
