Continued from page one...

...to our offices by our friends at the ABA:

"Montreal, Canada.  The new-look and newly renamed Cape Cod Frenzy arrived at the Pierre Charbonneau Arena in Montreal fully rested and raring to go.  After two weeks of training camp and a week of regular practice, the young Frenzy unit was ready to show the ABA what they can do.
 

What is missing from the lead paragraph?

• Opposing club name. The Frenzy played the Montreal Matrix;
• The final game score;
• A player or players who were the headliners of the game;
• Reading the whole gamer, the game ended in an exciting fashion. You have to read ten paragraphs to get there. The opening needs more tease that makes you want to read.

We generally don't re-write opening graphs for you, but for this occasion we helped out a bit, with the information available from the gamer:

"MLN Newswire - www.mlntherawfeed.com - Montreal, Canada. The new-look and newly renamed Cape Cod Frenzy survive their debut night with the Montreal Matrix 110-108 in a foul-induced nail-biter that tied the game with seconds left." [See the Full Gamer]

Most stories on a newswire are synopsized, usually using the first paragraph from the gamer, for use on news services like Google News, MSN, or Yahoo! News. This kind of lead is apt to get more click-through because it catches attention.

It is also good, in the headline, or in the headline sub-heading, to get the game score and the team names in.

'I Don't Have Time to Do Gamers'

Many of you have short turnarounds after games, and it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to get game news out other than via your radio broadcasts.

Wrong.

You attach it to your game notes for the next day, or put it in a team week that makes the majority of your games ancient history by the time that you get them out there.

Wrong.

You want your side of the story told. The other clubs that do better gamers will get their players, and their spin on the game out as the official record. Your fans will rely on third-party info to know more about their players than you provide to them. That viewpoint of your organization doesn't sell tickets well.

Some tactics for getting time to do gamers:

1. The KISS Method (Keep It Simple Stupid): If you can write a 3-5 sentence gamer for your team week synopsis, you can email this to the world after a game. Do SHORT gamers that are easy to dispatch, even over ancient arena telephone connections. Don't have time at the arena? To write it should take max about 20 minutes. To send it should take just a few moments, even on the slowest of systems.
   
   
2. The Delayed Gamer - Instead of attaching it as a preview or mothballing it until a weekly release, write a brief gamer the following day and send it out as a separate email before your pre-game story. That way it can be filed easily by the newswires, and even give some of the local fishwrap and TV stations something to chew on. Most read stories filed after deadline the next day anyway, so getting one out for the morning can work.
   
   
3. The Wi-Fi Card Method- Most of you carry around laptops. Verizon, Sprint, and others make Wi-Fi broadband internet cards. Get one, and you can send your material from anywhere, an arena, field, hotel, or the car, without worrying about finding a connection. Or get a T-Mobile or AT&T "hot-spot" Wi-Fi account and hit a store or hotel that uses them. AT&T is preferred since WayPort, which does a lot of hotel internet, is the agent that operates AT&T hot-spots, and has a sharing agreement with AT&T.

Your club is as strong as the face that it puts out to the world. Write the great gamer, and you will do both your organization, and the league, a great service by keeping your club on the radar for hundreds of thousands of readers daily.

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