Explaining Club Sports Coverage

The sports desk of The Daily Tar Heel endeavors to cover it all.

Our mission statement every year says we will strive to better our coverage of the 28 varsity sports of the University.

The important part of our statement is varsity. We don't even cover the junior varsity basketball squad, or mention it, unless we're talking about Jim Everett.

Consequentially, there is a large portion of athletes on this campus who are left out by the DTH: club sports.

At the beginning of last week, various desks at this paper were flooded by e-mails from club rugby, which needed to earn $8,000 to afford to go to the sweet 16 in a national tournament.

The e-mails reopened a long-running debate on how the DTH should cover club sports. The sports desk has steadfastly refused to cover club sports as long as I've been here for a number of reasons.

One of the arguments presented to the desk is that club sports athletes work just as hard as varsity ones. That might be true, but we don't cover sports based on which team wants it more.

But for us, there are some very good reasons why we don't cover club sports. Lack of staff and a lack of space are just tips of the iceberg. We don't have the resources to adequately cover lots of the varsity UNC sports -- ask any members of fencing, rowing or the track teams.

One e-mail said we were just covering "money" sports. The only sports at North Carolina that make money are men's basketball and football.

Part of the reason former UNC football coach Carl Torbush lost his job is because tickets sales were lagging. When football loses money, the athletic department loses money, and all the sports therein suffer. It's a sad but true fact you'll find at most universities across the country.

Lots of UNC sports don't even charge admission for events. You can waltz in to tennis matches, track meets, softball games and other events without contributing a dime to North Carolina's Department of Athletics.

Suggestions have been made in the past that we reserve some space once a week for running club sports scores and stats. It's a nice idea, but we have no way of verifying the accuracy of those numbers.

So, instead of doing anything, we as a paper have done nothing. Sure, there's been an occasional feature series, and there was the rugby story. But considering the size of club sports, it's woefully lacking.

The sports desk still isn't going to cover club sports, but that doesn't mean this paper is going to continue to ignore the efforts of hundreds of UNC students.

The DTH is going to treat the clubs like most clubs on campus and cover them as such. That doesn't mean that some DTH cub reporter is going to be keeping stats at a club soccer match.

And we still will use discretion about what is covered and what isn't.

It just means that we're not going to simply ignore club sports for fear of opening the floodgates. As with the rugby, we will consider the achievement of the club before assigning a story.

Whether people like it or not, North Carolina's heart beats around its athletics department. This newspaper was founded more than 100 years ago to give students information about the athletic teams of the University.

So, it's only fitting that the DTH informs students about the varsity teams of UNC while also giving some love to the students of club sports, who continue to chase their athletic dreams.

Rachel Carter can be reached at racarter@email.unc.edu.