A new approach to our coverage

By JACK SHEPPARD, Times Sports Editor
Published August 26, 2007

Nobody is more excited about the start of high school sports season than we are. Starting Tuesday, we'll show you why.

In an effort to provide high school coverage unprecedented in the Tampa Bay area, we have reshaped our writing team, redesigned our newspaper pages and heavily incorporated the use of our Web site tampabay.com for bonus stories and comprehensive results.

We will introduce you to Tampa Bay's first and only high school sports columnist, John C. Cotey. You'll begin seeing the work of our first high school feature/investigative reporter, Joey Knight. We'll roll out our county coverage teams: Bob Putnam and Brandon Wright in Pinellas, Joe Smith and Keith Niebuhr in Hillsborough, and David Murphy and Izzy Gould in Pasco and Hernando counties (where our high school coverage is moving to the main sports section).

We are also extremely excited to bring you football team Web pages, beginning Tuesday, for all of our area schools. Each page includes school information, schedules, rosters, updated team and individual stats, and links to individual pages for every player. As our coaches provide their weekly statistics, that information will be updated on both the team and individual pages, as well.

We'll also take advantage of the Internet to provide complete results from high school sports events. We'll run daily scoreboards and schedules in the newspaper, but for the first time we'll move our box scores, linescores and other team and individual results (swimming, cross country, etc.) to tampabay.com (so the whole world can follow our athletes' success).

We have a few other surprises up our sleeve, but more on that later.

So, starting Tuesday, come along for the ride. We think it's going to be a great one.

Jack Sheppard, sports editor

Fast Facts:

Meet the writers

John C. Cotey: cotey@sptimes.com or (727) 869-6261.

David Murphy:dmurphy@sptimes.com or (352) 848-1407.

Joey Knight: jknight@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3350.

Izzy Gould: igould@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4612

[Last modified August 25, 2007, 23:34:47]