Beat Journal #1

My beat is Oregon State athletics and more specifically, men’s basketball.
After yet another downtrodden weekend of hoops, the team lost their third and fourth games in a row to the two Washington schools. Some of the coverage from up north may surprise you.
In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which apparently is going out of business?), I found a blog from a guy who must have been writing there forever. His name is Dan Raley. Raley, it seems from his blogs, is on his way out at the PI and is making his “farewell tour” of Pac-10 arenas.
In his pre-game blog from Saturday evening, he writes that Gill Coliseum is as outdated as “that sports coat his wife made him throw out” and that the arena is as “rumpled as Ralph Miller.” Additionally, he basically made fun of the fact that the Beaver players were missing a lot of their warm-up shots.
It seems that this is what Beaver basketball has come to in places outside the Corvallis area. This team has become the butt of all jokes and it seems that writers may save their best “stuff” for when they come to Corvallis.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the Huskies went on to beat the Beavers by 26.
What may surprise you is what was written in the Daily Evergreen Online version, a newspaper from Pullman, WA – home of the Washington State Cougars.
The game summary from Friday is straight forward, with no implications of beating down on a bad team or anything.
The “lead-up” article to the game on Thursday was interesting in contrast to Seattle’s newspaper. Although it gave all relevant stats for the game, it went far in depth on the career of Coach Robinson and the strides he has already made here.
I like what the Evergreen did here. I believe the article is way more favorable to the Beavers because, if any one program can understand how bad a basketball team can be, it’s Washington State.
Washington- football aside – has always enjoyed mediocrity and has never fallen to the lows we saw last year. Therefore, their writers are more apt to make fun the Beaver program. In a way, I agree with both sides here. I feel that Raley’s blog fits more into the attitude in Seattle and I feel that the article in the Evergreen fits more into what people would like to read in Eastern Washington.