Cornell Hockey Coverage

[Dumbdumbs]

My two cents for the Sun's coverage of the hockey team: in today's age, it's easy to find video and stats of games, so summarizing the action isn't what makes the Sun's coverage so valuable. Rather, what makes the Sun so valuable is its access to the players and the coaches. The quotes from Schafer and the players after the game are always very interesting, and they're hard to find anywhere else. I enjoy the game summaries, but the key is to supplement those with plenty of reactions from the players and coaches. For the same reason, I would love profiles and interviews of the players and coaches. Brandon Thomas used to do a Freshman Friday feature when he was part of the Cornell communications department, but that has vanished. It would be amazing for the Sun to do something like that. Maybe an interview with a player each week, or something to that effect.

This is pretty much it. You want the right blend of Filling A Gap and Actually Achievable.

If you had someone who REALLY knows their stuff, and can find a way to write great in-depth explorations of things that can't be gleaned by Scouting the Stat Line, fine. But even most folks who think of themselves as Real Xs and Os types don't know what they're talking about most of the time. Pulling that off is unlikely.

So instead the focus should be on being the best student reporters you can be. The coverage can be serious of fun, hockey-focused or otherwise... but it should be different from what a bunch of fossils can manage on their own from Googling and an ESPN+ subscription.

Yes, Brandon Thomas's Freshman Friday pieces were great. Mimic them if you can get access to the players.

The Bed Red Hockeycast podcast was useful (for fans of the Men's team) its first season when they interviewed players on the Men's team. It wasn't because the two guys yakking on it were talented or insightful or knew-anything-about-hockey. They really, really didn't. So their recaps of the previous weekend were wastes. But they had an actual interview with a player each week and got a chance to ask a lot of questions. So even with most of the questions being dumb, there'd still be at some least good answers yielded. What's more, the "student perspective" was actually really great to have! It just happened to be limited to the two dumb students who happened to host that podcast. Something broader would be even better.

[BearLover]

My two cents for the Sun's coverage of the hockey team: in today's age, it's easy to find video and stats of games, so summarizing the action isn't what makes the Sun's coverage so valuable. Rather, what makes the Sun so valuable is its access to the players and the coaches. The quotes from Schafer and the players after the game are always very interesting, and they're hard to find anywhere else. I enjoy the game summaries, but the key is to supplement those with plenty of reactions from the players and coaches. For the same reason, I would love profiles and interviews of the players and coaches. Brandon Thomas used to do a Freshman Friday feature when he was part of the Cornell communications department, but that has vanished. It would be amazing for the Sun to do something like that. Maybe an interview with a player each week, or something to that effect.

This is pretty much it. You want the right blend of Filling A Gap and Actually Achievable.

If you had someone who REALLY knows their stuff, and can find a way to write great in-depth explorations of things that can't be gleaned by Scouting the Stat Line, fine. But even most folks who think of themselves as Real Xs and Os types don't know what they're talking about most of the time. Pulling that off is unlikely.

So instead the focus should be on being the best student reporters you can be. The coverage can be serious of fun, hockey-focused or otherwise... but it should be different from what a bunch of fossils can manage on their own from Googling and an ESPN+ subscription.

Yes, Brandon Thomas's Freshman Friday pieces were great. Mimic them if you can get access to the players.

The Bed Red Hockeycast podcast was useful (for fans of the Men's team) its first season when they interviewed players on the Men's team. It wasn't because the two guys yakking on it were talented or insightful or knew-anything-about-hockey. They really, really didn't. So their recaps of the previous weekend were wastes. But they had an actual interview with a player each week and got a chance to ask a lot of questions. So even with most of the questions being dumb, there'd still be at some least good answers yielded. What's more, the "student perspective" was actually really great to have! It just happened to be limited to the two dumb students who happened to host that podcast. Something broader would be even better.

While I agree with you that the hosts of the Big Red Hockeycast (2021-22 season) weren't brilliant hockey tacticians, neither are any of us on this forum, and neither are 99.5% or Cornell students. Your comment is quite rude, especially given some students read this forum. I thought the two hosts were good at asking questions and I enjoyed their rapport with the players. The podcast was clearly a fun hobby/activity for them rather than training for a future career in sports media, and despite this I really enjoyed the podcast and listened to every episode.

BTW, I thought the podcast would be alternating between the men's and women's teams? I'm curious why it's doing the women's team for the second year in a row. Alternating makes sense, and I support the women's team, but why not back to the men this year?

All that said, yes, the key to the Sun's coverage is access to the players and coaches and asking them interesting questions. Hearing about the players' classes, favorite things around campus, interests outside of hockey, is very fun in addition to the hockey stuff (why did you choose Cornell? What was your junior hockey experience? How do you view your own game?).

[Trotsky]

It's a really low bar.  Hopefully we'll begin to see something like the flowering of scriptwriting after fifty years of stifling by the networks, and we'll begin to see actual writers who cover sports, rather than the low effort, LCD hacks of the bad old days.

https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

Or... we'll see that.