AUSTIN — Fall Friday nights in Texas are a unique beast.
But for Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise Sports Editor Jon Styf, that was never more poignant than the evening of Sept. 17, 2010.
During a APSE Southwest Region Conference panel discussion of Friday night football coverage — the lifeblood of Texas high school sports — Styf led off the panel discussing how the Enterprise dealt with the death of West Orange-Stark quarterback Reggie Garrett during a game last season.
Garrett, a 17-year-old senior, collapsed on the sideline from a previously undetected heart disease after completing a touchdown drive, eventually being pronounced dead at a local hospital later that evening while the game continued to be played.
Dealing with deadline issues and a complete lack of official confirmation, Styf directed a joint effort from the newsroom to gather as much information as quickly as possible to get the story to print while also helping his on-site reporter gather himself in pursuit of the story.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of the computer, you’ve got go down to the sidelines and figure out what happened,’” Styf recalled.
Joining Styf in leading the panel were Houston Chronicle prep sports editor Jenny Dial and SportsDayHS web editor Kyle Whitfield of the Dallas Morning News.
Following the initial Friday night story about Garrett, the Enterprise ramped up coverage of the story, going at it from every possible angle over the coming week. Among the many angles included stories detailing all the different ways area teams honored Garrett, including all of the local starting quarterbacks wearing Garrett’s No. 12 the next game night, and a Sunday story with Seattle Seahawks safety Earl Thomas, a family friend of the Garretts, through a deal with the Denver Post.
Dial recounted how the Chronicle was slammed by reports and questions from concerned fans through Twitter and other forms of social media. The impact of Garrett’s death wasn’t just localized in the South Texas area, quickly garnering statewide attention as the Dallas Morning News’ weekly Friday night radio show was inundated with calls about it.
“It was a really big story that spread like wildfire that night,” Dial said.
Among the other topics discussed also included how SportsDayHS, the DMN’s high school sports website, has dealt with a new paywall and helped drive traffic by consolidating scores and statistics to a single page.
Focusing on a hyper-local product to appeal to local-minded advertisers, the DMN has directed its attention to online box scores and weekly team stats, while also using live up-to-the-minute game scores through a game night chat and a scoreboard page that can be updated with in-progress scoring information. The centralized in-progress scoreboard led to a more free-flowing chat and a unique source for fans to go to for their information.
“What’s unique is high school sports is the data because there’s nowhere else you can find it,” Whitfield said.
