Headliners

Back when TigerBlog was in the newspaper business, he spent 95 percent of his time covering games and five percent of his time working inside getting the paper out.

His favorite parts about working inside were 1) writing headlines, 2) the excitement of meeting different deadlines for different editions and 3) going out to eat after midnight in the Chambersburg section of Trenton.

Writing headlines can be as challenging as writing stories. Even today, TB sometimes takes longer to come up with the headline each day than he does writing the entire entry.

TB can't remember how many times people gave him a hard time for the headline on one of his stories in the paper, even though they were written by someone on the copy desk. Conversely, he would write headlines on other people's stories, and presumably, other people would blame them for not liking the headlines that TB had come up with.

For a newspaper, the headline has be a certain size, over a certain number of columns, which in turn limits how many characters you can use. This can impact creativity.

TigerBlog is pretty sure he's mentioned this before, but he can still remember his two favorite headlines. One was after the Philadelphia Eagles were having trouble with their kicking game and brought in two free agents for tryouts without signing either. The other was when the Philadelphia Phillies were in Pittsburgh and outfielder Lenny Dykstra had to come back to have emergency surgery.

TB's headlines:

"Eagles' kicking circus auditions two new clowns" and "Dykstra's appendix out at home"

The second one was better.

TB's former colleague Kurt Kehl used to be the designer of the football game program. He used to love when the headline matched the main picture that was used, like the time that TB wrote a story about All-Ivy defensive end Darrell Oliveira.

For that story, there was a picture of Oliveira as he swatted the ball away as a quarterback threw it. The headline was "No Passing."

TB has always been fascinated by the idea that every game starts with an endless number of possible headlines and then ends up with just one at the end.
Sometimes, when your team loses, it's the headline you hate to have to see (or worse, write).
 
The headline in the Trenton Times after the 1996 Ivy League men's basketball playoff between Princeton and Penn could have gone a million different ways, but it ended up being this: "Princeton Wins, Carril Retires."

For goprincetontigers.com or here at the blog, headline writing is a little easier, since you can adjust the number of characters pretty much however you want. It also affords another arena to be creative.

There are six stories that rotate through the main page of GPT at any given time. At one point yesterday, three of the six headlines featured the word "named" in them.

At this time of year, that's a good sign. The "named" in each case referred to Princeton athletes who had been "named" all-something.

Two of them were field hockey related. The other was women's volleyball.

For women's volleyball, Maggie O'Connell was named to the All-Region team. You can read that HERE.

In field hockey, the coaching staff earned a collective honor, being named the Mid-Atlantic Region staff of the year. You can read about that one HERE.

There haven't been a lot of coaching staffs who have had to deal with what Princeton's field hockey staff did this year, as head coach Carla Tagliente gave birth about two-thirds of the way through the season. The rest of the staff made sure the team didn't skip a beat, winning the Ivy League championship and then three NCAA tournament games to reach the national final before falling to North Carolina.

Of course, you can't have that kind of season without having great players. Princeton certainly had that.

In fact, three of them were named All-Americans: Clara Roth on the first team and Julianna Tornetta and Hannah Davey on the second team.

You can read about them HERE.

Anyway, the point of all this is that when you see the word "named" in a headline, it's usually a pretty good sign.

Actually, as TB goes back and looks, the last five headlines on the field hockey page all have the word "named" in it.

That's how you know you had a really good year.