I wish I could buy the world a Coke and keep it company.

Until then, I’ll just try to get as many high school teams from our coverage areas in the paper as possible over the course of the season, cause that’s the only way I can try to keep readers happy.

Or at least the most amount of readers happy, anyway.

Lately, I’ve been getting complaints about how our SouthMetro Sports section doesn’t have enough coverage from a certain community, or that there is a bias toward certain communities over others. I think maybe there is a misunderstanding about what we’re going for with CCN Sports since we made the design change at the start of the 2009-10 school year.

Starting with our Fall Sports Preview 2010, our sports section became a special pullout section. It was already decided that this pullout section would be named SouthMetro Sports, and this was for a couple of reasons.

For the communities in our coverage ares, CCN publishes three local papers in Arapahoe County and five local papers in Douglas County. We decided to separate our pullout section for sports into two editions, a Arapahoe County edition, which would include the high school and community sports relative to the Centennial Citizen, Littleton Independent and Englewood Herald, and a Douglas County edition which includes sports relative to the Douglas County/Castle Rock News-Press, the Highlands Ranch Herald, the Lone Tree Voice and the Parker Chronicle.

So, the SouthMetro Sports section you see in the Douglas County News-Press is the same pull out section that appears in the Parker Chronicle and so on. The same goes for our community papers further north; the one pullout section goes in each of the three papers.

Since we moved our sports coverage to that format, I’ve aimed to organize coverage with one priority. In the instance of the SouthMetro Sports section for Douglas County, at least one team from each community would be represented in that week’s edition. That means, every week, I try to make sure we have photos, a story or both on at least one team from Castle Rock, Parker and Highlands Ranch/Lone Tree.

Now, I will admit it doesn’t always work out that way. Some editions will end up being, say, Parker-heavy, but it’s not from a lack of trying, and I usually try to compensate down the road. Sometimes coaches and/or player get busy and don’t return phone calls or e-mails in a timely fashion. Sometimes the weather plays a factor in which games we can get to photograph and catch up with interviews.

I also try to rotate coverage around so that a different school is represented on the cover of the sports edition every week. This also is tough to keep up with, especially having fewer schools to cover in our areas of Arapahoe County, but definitely that’s our aim.

It’s been almost a whole school year, and I still get the occasional call saying, there’s too much Highlands Ranch sports in the Parker paper. Or vice versa, saying we’re biased toward Parker schools instead of Highlands Ranch teams in the community’ sown paper. Like I said, some weeks it may appear that way, but it’s simply not true.

This is the SouthMetro Sports coverage we’re trying to provide our readers. All our teams are placed in the same section, regardless which paper in that county it appears in. For the most part, readers and especially coaches have said they really enjoy the new format. To the few of you out there who were still confused, I hope this clears things up a bit.