Nice changes at the N&O

The sports section this morning really did read like the Raleigh News & Observer rather than the Charlotte N&O.

I wrote earlier this week about how alarming it was for there to be nothing in Monday’s paper after the two top-ranked men’s college soccer teams in the country played Sunday in the Triangle. Not even a score. Also alarming was the apparent pattern of ignoring Triangle non-revenue college sports in the N&O while running blurbs on Charlotte and Davidson games.

Hopefully Friday’s paper is evidence that this is changing.

First, the N&O played a little catch up on its coverage of the now top-ranked UNC men’s soccer team with a nice story from Jonathan Jones. I attended the 2-1 victory over then-No. 1 Louisville on Sunday, but I learned a lot I didn’t know from that story. On top of that, the story started on the sports front.

Second, there was a short non-revenue college sports roundup on page 2 that included blurbs on N.C. State women’s soccer, Duke cross country and Duke volleyball. And, appropriately, nothing about how the soccer teams at Davidson and Charlotte fared (we’ll leave that for the Charlotte Observer).

It also was nice to have byline stories on the Durham Bulls’ playoff games this week from veteran baseball writer Mike Potter, even if the scores haven’t been so nice.

I’m not advocating blowout coverage of non-revenue college sports because I realize that there isn’t enough interest for that. But a newspaper’s sports section should be like a grocery store with a little bit of everything. It shouldn’t be a specialty store.

The N&O has and likely still will provide excellent ACC football and basketball coverage. The level of this coverage is entirely appropriate and I will continue to enjoy it. But hopefully when another huge non-revenue game comes up, it will get coverage on the front page.

There still is a complete lack of agate on non-revenue sports and, considering some of the wire agate that makes it onto the Scoreboard page (today's Scoreboard had the top 64 Champions Tour points leaders and extensive Champions Tour statistics), it’s not for space reasons. There’s plenty of high school sports agate, but that’s there because the coaches called the paper to give them the information.

At the very minimum, you should be able to pick up the sports section of a newspaper and see a schedule on the scoreboard page of games to be played that day and the next day. That doesn’t happen in the N&O.

You might wonder why I call them non-revenue sports at a time when sports-information offices and many newspapers call them “Olympic sports.” I know it’s an attempt to give them a name that sounds better, but it doesn’t make any sense for at least three sports.

Men’s basketball is in the Olympics, but isn’t defined by SIDs as an “Olympic sport.” Golf and baseball are not in the Olympics, but are somehow meet the definition of “Olympic sports.”

Whatever you call them, I hope to read more about  them (for schools in the Triangle area and not the Charlotte area) during the school year in the N&O!