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So, you write about sports:
Whether you are a sports journalist, a blogger, or a student writing for local or university newspapers, you want your story to attract readers. Even if sports writing is nothing but your academic assignment asking you to write a college basketball essay, for example, you need it to engage and be memorable to the audience.
How do you do that? How can you make the reader feel the drama of college basketball in your text?
Here work the power and principles of storytelling in sports writing.
Ready to reveal and apply them to your content? Keep reading, and you’ll find out.
Why Storytelling?
Storytelling is the art of… well, telling a story. A storyteller uses corresponding elements and images of a story to encourage a reader’s (listener’s) imagination and make them feel related to that narrative.
It’s an ancient art:
We all tell stories, read them in books, watch them in movies, and meet them in marketing messages of our favorite brands. Sports is also made of stories: Each basketball player has theirs to communicate with the audience, awaken their emotions, inspire them, and connect with fans.
Sportswriters use storytelling in their works to strengthen their message.
Why is this technique so powerful?
- The human brain operates with stories, responding better to narratives because they activate the areas responsible for experiences.
When you combine data in your sports writing with a story, its retention increases from 5-10% to 67%!
How to build your text about college basketball to turn it into a compelling story? Below are the details.
Who’s Your Hero, and What’s Their Journey?
No story exists without characters. Who is the protagonist of your writing: a college basketball player, a sports club, any basketball-related product, its customer, or the audience?
Characters (main and supportive ones) serve as the must-have element of a classic storytelling technique all writers know as monomyth, i.e., a hero’s journey:
Image: SlideShare
Your sports story revolves around a hero who gets the call to adventure, faces challenges, overcomes trials, finds a solution, and returns with a trophy.
(Most Hollywood blockbusters do that: Take Rocky, Coach Carter, or The Basketball Diaries as examples.)
So:
When writing your story, ensure it has a hero. More than that, give your readers a hero they can relate to.
5 Elements for Your Sports Writing to Become a Story
Besides a hero, you’ll need other storytelling elements to capture the drama of college basketball or any other sports you write about.
- Setting: The location and time (where and when) your event(s) happen. Setting establishes the context for the audience to understand what’s happening and relate to it.
- Characters: As mentioned, they are a protagonist and supportive characters (if any) in your story. They drive a plot, build empathy, and draw the readers in.
- Conflict: A problem your protagonist resolves. It introduces tension the hero needs to win through, highlighting pain points and struggles.
- Climax: It’s the peak of your sports story, emphasizing the turning point.
- Resolution: The conclusion of your story, illustrating the hero’s transformation (not necessarily positive) and communicating the moral. What do you want the readers to learn or understand?
Combining all five elements, you create a narrative arc, i.e., the sequence of the events in your story.
That’s how to craft it:
How to Format Your Story?
A narrative arc is a sequence of the events of your story, the framework that gives it a structure. A classic arc has five components: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Place them chronologically so your sports writing sounds logical yet compelling to the audience:
Start with an exposition. It’s the introduction of your story, with all the background information about the characters and setting.
Think of what will serve as a rising action. It’s a trigger, a moment when conflict appears, creating tension and making the audience understand what your sports story is about.
A climax is the main event of your story, the highest tension when the hero faces the truth and makes a choice.
After the climax, continue with a falling action. It’s the moment of conflict resolution, the result of the hero’s choice.
Conclude with a moral or a point of view you intended to share with your readers.
All five components of a narrative arc are essential to include in your story to capture readers’ interest and attention. Still, it’s okay to cover at least three basic ones: exposition (in your text’s introductory paragraph), climax (in the text body), and resolution (in your concluding paragraph).
Once you’ve mastered this classic storytelling technique, you can also try alternative storytelling formats to make your sports writing more eye-grabbing, authentic, and engaging. Savvy writers often break the format of a traditional narrative arc to make their stories more memorable.
You can take a hero’s journey and change the sequence of its elements to build alternative storylines:
- Mountain: This is a structure when you abrupt a storyline with a sudden climactic conclusion that doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending.
- Nest: A structure where you take three or more stories (of basketball players, coaches, etc.) and place them within each other, with a core message in the center.
- In media res: Drop the readers right into the climax so they are eager for more details and resolution.
These are just three alternative storytelling techniques for you to consider for sports writing. Why not try them all and choose the most efficient one for your plot and target audience?
Ready to Write Your College Basketball Story?
A story is the format that resonates with your readers most. Use storytelling to communicate your sports writing to the audience โ and you’ll move them closer to capturing the drama of college basketball, professional basketball championships, NBA games, niche intrigues, you name it!
Take all five elements of a story, choose a narrative arc that hooks and wows your targets, and you’ll write a resonating text they’ll remember long after reading.
