This week was a bit of a different week as we weren’t actually coming prepared with our story, but actually what we wanted to write it about and who we were going to interview as we were going to watch a rugby game of England Knights vs world cup team Cook Islands ahead of the Rugby League Women’s World Cup. Because of this i decided to focus on the England Knights as they were a team of players who had just missed out on selection for the World cup. The story then was about what they would do to make the next squad in 2025.
The approach i took was looking for players on google before going, who i believed were already on the edge of making it into that first team squad and tried to ask questions about how they would do it. I then made the story about the game they were about to play, so they would have a small taste of playing a World Cup quality side, and asking how that helps motivate them to try their best to make it just one step higher.
I divided up my work load by making sure i got the majority of my interviews before the game, except for one and then whilst the actual game was on, i went upstairs and started to write my work out. Got my last interview after the game and then finished up.
I contacted three of the English Knights players and what I thought went well about the day was just the access we had to everything. I had loads of interviews to choose from and could have even included more quotes than I did. The occasion was a closed doors event, so usually we wouldn’t have been able to even have these sorts of interviews. This made it much easier to think of a good story as there were so many options I could’ve explored.
If there was one thing that I do believe could’ve gone better it would’ve had to be that I maybe should have watched the match so that when I was writing about the match specifically, even if my story as a whole wasn’t about the game, I could’ve maybe included some details about players who stood out for example as they could be close to breaking through and things like that. I didn’t do this because I only thought of it after the game and then also I would have been behind on time when it would’ve come to actually writing the story.
If i was going to do anything differently, I would’ve probably wrote a story about the Cook Islands as they were actually playing in the World Cup and they of course had travelled from so far away. It could’ve been an interesting story but I wasn’t one hundred percent on what angle to take and then when the idea came to my head about the Knights, I thought it was a good story.