I have no doubt that your sports crew is doing a great job of covering the athletes and teams at your school. They provide wall-to-wall coverage of the big games while they are happening and/or after the final whistle or buzzer.
But if your publications are anything like mine, your sports department is missing the other half of the equation: the media’s role in getting its audience ready for that game! We used to do this by writing a preview story for our website, which admittedly very few people read. It just wasn’t the ideal platform for something like that.
Luckily, we stumbled on something so much better: a podcast. It lends itself beautifully to a preview, as it lets fans listen on their way to school or work the day of the game, or even on the way to the game itself. The beauty of this type of podcast is it takes little to no editing; just add the intro and outro music, adjust any audio levels that might need it, and it’s ready to go out to the world!
We often format these by splitting the episode in two parts, a quick recap of the most recent game(s), and then a deep-dive into the upcoming game and opponent. The best advice here is to make sure your hosts have questions prepared ahead of time so they’re not bumbling and stumbling their way through the conversation. Do your homework so you can get into more specific topics, and thus give your audience detailed info they can’t get anywhere else. Ask a coach or player about a specific moment from a past game or a specific matchup that might prove problematic in this game, and then go from there.
The way I put it to my students is that this prep time is giving you a roadmap to follow during the episode, and then you can treat the conversation like a roadtrip: you know the key spots you want to stop, but you’re not sure how long you might spend there, and you never know when you might take a detour, so be cool with that, too. If you stumbled on something interesting that isn’t on your original list of questions, go with it. But you know if you veer too far off (usually thanks to a quirky guest) and get lost, you can refer to your map and get right back on track.
And the beauty of this type of story is that they tend to be brief yet informative, thus easily digestible for a listener in the car, walking the dog, or folding laundry. It really has become a great way to connect with and inform our audience!
Here are some sample podcasts that previewed upcoming games:
Football:
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/3BNUKzE2Ovn3lcp8zKRbmv?si=FbCAYbwKTvO40F-O2rAxVw
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/1k347wTQvzyGC8f8weFqz0?si=LP83uNQTR3C7mUprsaxgzg
Girls’ basketball:
Note: This post was originally part of my MJE Project, “Beyond the Box Score: A Multimedia Approach to Comprehensive High School Sports Coverage,” which I completed in the Fall of 2025.
Written By: Jason Block
