‘Reading the Sports Page’
courtesy of ‘Photos by Chip Py’

My earliest memories of the sports pages are the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sporting Green, the pale green pages of newsprint with the box scores from around the country, my beloved 49ers, the Oakland A’s, Susan Slusser, Ray Ratto, and others. I’ve always loved sports journalism when it’s done well, and for a long time the pages of the Sporting Green were a part of that.

The Internet’s made possible a whole other world of sports journalism and commentary, and in many regards, DC is a fine example, blessed with some talented beat writers, and some equally talented interested independents. Looking at places like SB Nation’s local DC site, you can see that there’s a lot of good stuff happening. As of this afternoon, that scene just got more diverse.

Welcome to District Sports Page, the all-online sports effort from the folks that brought you Caps News Network and Nats News Network, both of which are being folded into the new site. We caught up with founder Dave Nichols this afternoon.

‘Swim team, University of Washington, 1921’
courtesy of ‘UW Digital Collections’

What Nichols saw as lacking wasn’t the Who, What, Where, When of sports journalism, but rather the How and the Why:

“There are a lot of great regional sites and individual blogs out there, but as a consumer of sports news in D.C. I’ve always felt like there was something missing,” Nichols said,  “I think with our emphasis on local writers and original content, we can fill an area that might be going underserved in the market… We want to bring varied coverage – not just games stories and stats, though that’s obviously a large part of what we’ll do, but we also want to present the human side of sports and the athletes we cover though features and profiles.  We covered the teams’ impact in the community on our previous blogs, and we wanted to expand that coverage and emphasize it a little more on the new page as well.”

It’s hard not to like Nichols’ moxie, especially when you see what he’s built elsewhere on the net. Nichols has spearheaded not just the Nats News Network, but the local chapter of the Internet Baseball Writers Association, as well as the credentialed blogs listed above. This should be a fascinating effort, and worth your attention.