BEHIND THE STORY: COUNTDOWN TO KICKOFF
By Jay Hansen
How do you describe the entirety of the Ohio State football experience?
That was the question we pondered when we decided to take a look at Buckeye football for our July/August edition of Ohio State Alumni Magazine. It was a daunting question to tackle, because there are so many things that go into a game day, each of which could probably be a story on its own.
But in lieu of turning a year’s worth of magazines over to football, we instead met as a staff and narrowed down a list of things we thought were interesting. Our rationale was pretty simple: What does a fan do on game day, and what goes into making all of those things happen?
Once we had our list of story elements in mind, we enlisted some reporters. Jerry Dannemiller, Brent LaLonde, and Amber Stephens are veteran writers for our magazine, and we knew we could count on them to get to the heart of what we wanted. Amber agreed to pursue the band and cheerleading angle, while Brent and Jerry tackled game day itself. The writers attended the Northwestern and Illinois games last year, and gathered information from in and around Ohio Stadium. At the same time, two photographers–Jamie Sabau and Jay Laprete—were on the streets, doing their best to capture the essence of a game day with strong images.
The work Amber, Brent, and Jerry took on went far past attending one event, though. Amber was charged with visiting a few practice sessions to get a flavor for what the band and cheerleaders go through. Brent and Jerry attended games, but also had to do significant background work to identify some of the facts you can’t get on game day itself–things like the regular food order for Ohio Stadium, or the amount of work that goes into producing Ohio State’s game-day magazine.
Our reporters submitted their outlines earlier this year, and sent along their stories a bit later. The photographers submitted their photos shortly thereafter, and we got to work.
We were pretty excited once we got all that material in hand, but we felt like something was missing. Our initial goal was to chronicle the fan experience. But once we had our copy, the absence of information about the team was glaring. So we brought in one of our new writers, Bruce Hooley, to give us some of the nuts and bolts of what the team does each week. We knew Bruce would give us some good stuff. He was the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Ohio State beat reporter for 18 years before taking a job co-hosting a sports radio talk show in Columbus with Kirk Herbstreit. His contributions provided more depth to the story.
Weaving the story and photos into a strong cover package was the challenge that faced magazine editor Lynne Bonenberger and senior art director Whitney Bailey. Over the course of a few months Lynne and Whitney took all of these disparate pieces and started to work them into one story. For Lynne, melding the contributions of four different writers into one cohesive story put her wordsmithing skills to the test. For Whitney, presenting this story in a new and fresh way was a big challenge to tackle. She and our staff spent many hours standing in front of our production wall, making suggestions and helping the project come together.
Lastly, we needed a strong cover image. After a bit of debate, we agreed that the most singular image related to Ohio State football is the silver helmet players wear for each game. So we got a helmet (it was former Buckeye fullback Nicky Sualua's) and had photographer Tom Watson take some photos of it. Tom’s work is reflected on the cover of the magazine.
In the end, we think this worked out well. There were so many different pieces to the story, and pulling them all together was a task we feel we accomplished successfully. We hope you feel the same.
