The Decision Nobody Tells You About
Before I write a word or hit record on an episode, I face the same choice every time. Do I get on a plane or drive to the match, or do I build the story from calls, streams, and other people’s footage?
It sounds like a logistics question. It is not. It changes what kind of story you end up with.
What You Get by Showing Up
Being in the stadium gives you things a stream never will. You hear what the crowd sounds like when a youth academy graduate scores his first goal for the first team. You see a coach’s face in the tunnel before anyone has decided how the match will be framed. You catch the small moment, a parent crying in section 112, a groundskeeper repairing a patch of turf at halftime, that never makes the broadcast.
Those details do not always make it into the final piece. But they change how you write the parts that do. A quote lands differently when you watched the person’s hands shake while they said it.
Traveling for a story also opens doors that a phone call does not. People talk longer, more loosely, when you have made the effort to be where they are. I have had better conversations standing by a training ground fence than I ever have over a scheduled call.
What You Give Up
None of that is free. Travel costs time I could spend on three other stories. It costs money. And it can trap you into writing about whatever is in front of you, even when the more interesting story is somewhere else that week.
There is also a bias that creeps in when you travel for something. You want the trip to have been worth it, so you reach for drama that might not be there. I have caught myself doing this: padding a routine match report because I did not want to admit the real story was thinner than I’d hoped.
How I Actually Decide
I ask one question first: is this story about an event, or about a person?
If it is about an event, a result, a milestone, a record, I can usually cover it well from outside the stadium. Box scores, league data, and a couple of calls afterward tell you what happened and why it mattered. Being there adds color, but it does not add truth.
If it is about a person, their path, their decisions, how they think, I want to be in the room. Development stories especially. You cannot understand what a coaching staff is building inside a youth program by watching highlights. You have to watch a Tuesday practice that nobody is filming.
That split is not perfect. Budget and schedule override it plenty of times. But it keeps me honest about why I am traveling, instead of traveling because it feels like real journalism and staying home feels like settling.
A Smaller Rule That Helps
When I cannot go in person, I try to replace at least one piece of what travel would have given me. That usually means a longer call than I planned, or asking someone to describe the physical scene I am missing: what the locker room smelled like, what was said before the cameras turned on. It is not the same as being there. It gets me closer than relying on secondhand quotes alone.
The Takeaway
If you are building anything in sports media, you will hit this choice constantly, and the answer is rarely about budget alone. It is about what the story actually needs to be true. Events can be reported from anywhere. People usually cannot.
Ask which one you are chasing before you book the ticket, or decide not to. That question has saved me from more wasted trips, and more thin stories, than any editing trick I know.