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Joel Reichenberger

Joel Reichenberger's column appears Sundays in the Steamboat Pilot & Today. Contact him at 871-4253 or e-mail jreichenberger@SteamboatToday.com.

Steamboat Springs — An interview Wednesday with Casey Williams, of the Steamboat Springs High School wrestling team, turned awkward for me, and it had nothing to do with singlets or a 10-second pin.

“Man, Casey always gets interviewed,” one of the other Sailors offered as I was finishing up my talk with Williams, a junior who has been one of the team’s best wrestler since his freshman year.

It was pointed out that we had talked to only one athlete besides Williams on this year’s team. A little checking showed that’s not exactly true, but close. We’ve quoted Williams and two other Sailors wrestlers this season.

I was immediately inspired to make two comments. The first is short: Oops. The Steamboat Springs High School wrestling program doesn’t have a ton of home events, so there are only so many opportunities to get athletes in the paper, but we still should do a better job.

The second comment, an explanation for how a sportswriter picks his interview subjects, might shed some light on how the process works.

Part of my overall goal in covering a team throughout a season is to spread the wealth when it comes to interviews. Ideally, I don’t ever want to talk to an athlete more than once, at least not until I’ve included comments from all other athletes.

That’s not always as easy as it seems, and that’s true for reasons more complex than the fact that I don’t keep a list of who I last talked to.

Spreading the wealth with interviews is nice, but only to a point. It doesn’t make much sense to skip talking to the player who hit the buzzer-beating shot because he or she made the paper last week.

So, the outcome of the game or match is a factor. And so is the team. I apply some of this same thought process to choosing and submitting my photos. I try not to use the same kid every week, but the best player on the team is going to be in so many more photos that it’s often hard not to repeat throughout a season. That goes for interviews, too. The kid who played wire-to-wire and was involved in most of the scoring plays will, theoretically at least, have more insight into what happened.

I do put some thought into this. Often, I’ll make an effort not to talk to the high scorer on a basketball team when I know a bigger game and the chance for a bigger stage is coming up.

Sometimes, I head for a certain athlete because his or her role or history fits with the theme I’m after. That’s what I was looking for with Williams. I was writing about the pressure of the regional wrestling tournament, and as the only athlete on the team who’d seen success and disappointment through that pressure, he was uniquely qualified to comment.

Getting more athletes involved makes for better stories, and I know the kids and their families like seeing their names in the paper. But there’s no exact formula to reporting. And if we occasionally go heavy with one athlete or another, I hope no one takes it as an insult to the other athletes on a team.