New feature: Weekend in Review

In our ongoing quest to spend more hours per week on roller derby than there actually are in a week, DNN is happy (and slightly terrified) to roll out a new weekly feature for 2010, the Weekend In Review.

Over the course of 2009, we had to make a sanity decision given the amount of derby that was out there, and decided to put our recap focus strictly on high-level interleague bouts (it takes a fair amount of time to edit and prep a recap for the site, find photos, secure photo permissions, that kind of thing). This year we'll still be featuring high-level WFTDA bouts as the primary site content, but in the Weekend in Review, we'll be trying to collect and post short capsule recaps of any bout we've got in the database. Not only that, we're going to try and get this posted every Monday by noon in an effort to further damage our shaky economy by reducing workplace productivity.

This is a LOT of bouts and represents a dramatic increase in the scope of our coverage (and, consequently, the amount of time we'll be spending on this site.) So to make this work, we really really need your help.

First of all, let me reiterate that a big goal of this project is timeliness -- we often get recaps late in the week following a bout, or sometimes more than a week later. Because these capsule recaps will be short -- 150-300 words or so -- we hope that it's not unreasonable to make a deadline of Sunday night at midnight for Weekend in Review pieces. In most cases, that means within 24 hours of the bout.

Don't panic, though. Again, these recaps won't be as long as our normal feature stories and will be combined into a single post. Don't worry too much if you don't have a dedicated recap writer on your league. Fresh meat, injured players, stat crew or even a particularly good superfan would be ideal for this role. We're envisioning a structure that doesn't really require a whole lot of wordsmithing, just an ability to take a few notes during the game and/or get your hands on the bout stats. It's really super simple. Here are some important data points to hit, in approximate order of importance.

+ Bout location (city & venue)

+ The score at the 15 minute mark, halftime, 45 minute point and (obviously) the end.

+ The game time and score at any lead change. If there are none, you want to mention the game time and score at which the bout was the closest.

+ The highest-scoring jammer from each team, along with her score total. If you can get more detailed stats like jammer point differential, team penalties, most penalized players and the like, that would be great. If not, don't sweat it.

+ Standout defensive players. You want to give credit wherever it is due, but resist the temptation to list *everybody* or it sort of defeats the purpose.

+ The names of any players playing in their first or last bouts for either team.

+ The 2010 win/loss record of each team (like, "With their defeat of the Bitching Jerks, the Jerkface Douchebags improved to 3-1 on the year while the Bitching Jerks are still winless at 0-4.")

+ If you have a high-quality picture from the bout to send along (or even better, a link to a Flickr gallery of shots from the game), AWESOME. If not, no worries. We'd rather have the recap up on Monday than wait an extra couple of days for an image. If you do send a picture, be sure to include the photographer's name and email address.

If you don't have all this information in time to submit a recap by Sunday night, just send us what you have, even if it's just three sentences. It doesn't have to be perfect -- we'll edit it for style & grammar. If you really really have nobody who is willing to compile a recap, just have somebody grab the scoresheet post-game and send in some of the data points listed above, and I'll make something out of it, although getting a recap would be MUCH preferable.

It looks like a lot, but it's not really. Remember that brevity is key. Unless the game is super crazy close, two paragraphs should be enough to give the reader a sense of the nature of the bout, and you probably shouldn't need to go over four.

For now, you can send these recaps directly to us via the submission form, but if this takes off -- and we hope it will -- we'll probably be setting leagues up with regional editors, because I will go right the fuck insane if I have to edit 40 of these things myself every Sunday night.

Thanks in advance to the DNN nation for helping us out with this super-ambitious project. We're pretty confident that we can make DNN 2010 an even more robust source for derby info than DNN 2009 with your help.