Bennett Durando, Richard Silva and Tommy Deas of the Montgomery Advertiser won first place in the 2022 Associated Press Sports Editors contest in the Division D Event Coverage category for their coverage of Auburn’s firing of football coach Bryan Harsin. 

APSE contest winners will be honored at the 2023 APSE Summer Conference banquet at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas on July 12. Click here to register for the conference, which begins on July 9 and will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of APSE.    

Matt Schuckman of Muddy River Sports was second, and McClain Baxley, Ryne Dennis, Joshua Jones, Fletcher Page and Marc Weiszer of the Athens Banner-Herald took third. 

The Montgomery Advertiser will receive a plaque. The second- through 10th-place finishers will receive frameable certificates.                                                                                                         

Sports editors in Division D submitted 22 entries in Event Coverage. Each entry could include up to five articles about an event from a 24-hour period. 

Contest chair Naila-Jean Meyers and fellow APSE officers Jorge Rojas, Dan Spears and Ed Reed prepared the entries. The contest is open to APSE members. Click here to join.

Contest results: Sections, digital, video | Writing and photography

In February, judges at the APSE Winter Conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and remote judges around the country selected up to 10 top entries, with each judge ranking the entries in order with 1 being the best. In this category, a top 5 was chosen. Entries were given 5 points for a first-place vote, 4 points for second and so on down to one point for a fifth-place vote. The final 5 were given to a second judging group, which ranked the entries 1-10 in the same fashion. 

The top 5 is listed below with voting results and links to the winning entries.

  1. The Montgomery Advertiser, Bennett Durando, Richard Silva, Tommy Deas: Auburn fires football coach Bryan Harsin 1 2 3 4 5, 28 points (4 first-place votes)
  2. Muddy River Sports, Matt Schuckman: Crosstown boys soccer rivalry game 1 2 3 4, 23 points (2 first-place votes) 
  3. Athens Banner-Herald, McClain Baxley, Ryne Dennis, Joshua Jones, Fletcher Page, Marc Weiszer: Georgia wins BCS championship 1 2 3 4 5, 18 points 
  4. Legacy Hockey, Loren Nelson: Minnesota state boys hockey championships  1 2 3 4, 14 points
  5. The Topeka Capital-Journal: Jordan Guskey. Kansas in the Liberty Bowl 1 2 3 4, 7 points