For those of you who follow sports, you know game summary is important. But, it’s what’s in between the lines that can adequately provide analysis or even hype towards a team.
The Belmont Vision sports department has developed a niche in telling the who and what of a game, but I have always felt that our coverage could be taken to the next level with the addition of “why’s” and “how’s.”
I had addressed this notion to managing editor Autumn Allison over late-night McDonald’s in the middle of covering the Atlantic Sun Championship last year, halfway joking that it would be pretty neat if we could find a way to team up with The Byrd Cage. They were writing some pretty interesting analysis I thought students might want to check out.
“We were just kinda doing it for fun the season before last, then last year we posted more frequently and the athletic department was great at getting us access and we started posting consistently,” said Kyle Williams, a writer at The Byrd Cage.
It’s only appropriate that nearly a year after that whim of a conversation at the Super 8 in Macon, Georgia, that I can say that the Belmont Vision is going to be working with The Byrd Cage after all.
We were able to get the ball rolling at this year’s Murray State game, where a majority of Nashville media had been confined to a table into a corner of the second story of the CFSB Center. If we were lucky, we could see the action at the end of the court when we weren’t trying to secure our laptops from falling over the precipice into a sea of angry Racers fans.
I found that the writers of the Byrd Cage are all about conversation – they had been going to games for years but noticed that there wasn’t much other than what Belmont media had been saying about the team.
“We thought that if we were talking, then other people will want to talk, so we thought we’d start our own thing. There’s definitely a place for us to be talking about Belmont Basketball,” Williams said.
Since their launch, their posts have been mentioned by local sports and national blogs, and were getting thousands of hits after teaming up with Georgetown fan blog, the Casual Hoya, during the NCAA Tournament last year.
Because their readership is largely alumni-based, the “why’s” and “how’s” analysis by The Byrd Cage has largely remained undiscovered by the current Belmont student body.
“We saw a lot of people engaging in our conversation were other alumni or those outside the inner workings, but we came to love basketball as a student, so we want to get students involved,” Williams said.
Byrd Cage’s most recent coverage has included interviews with opposing coaches like Murray State’s Steve Prohm, experiences on the road at Murray State and Tennessee State and coverage of last weekend’s “Crash the Curb” game versus Ohio.
Our hope is that when you read our Belmont Vision coverage, you’ll check out what the folks at The Byrd Cage have to say too, and vice versa.
On behalf of the Vision staff, we are proud to invite you, the readers, to experience the story of the men’s basketball program with both us and The Byrd Cage as we gear up for the Ohio Valley Conference tournament, and hopefully, March Madness.