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An introduction

By Craig Meyer / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 7 years ago

These kind of posts have a tendency to be a little self-indulgent and drag on, so I’ll aim to keep this brief.

My name is Craig Meyer and I’m the Post-Gazette’s new Pitt basketball writer. In addition to my basketball responsibilities, which will take up the bulk of this position, I’ll also be helping out my colleague, Sam Werner, with Pitt football and the paper’s overall coverage of the university’s athletic department. Paul Zeise, who did a great job covering the team the past two seasons, will be writing sports opinion pieces for the paper, an area in which he should more than excel.

Before we get going, a little bit about me: I’ve been at the Post-Gazette for about the past three and a half years, a period in which I most recently covered Duquesne basketball and West Virginia football. In the two-or-so years prior to that, I wrote about high school sports and Robert Morris basketball, along with a few other things.

College basketball, for as long as I can remember, has been a part of who I am. I grew up in Louisville, Ky., nestled near the center of a geographic triangle that connects three of the sport’s preeminent programs, where basketball is less a sport and more a way of life. It’s cliché, but to many, it’s religion, a game with an appeal and importance that transcends what it actually is — 10 college-aged kids chucking a rubber ball at a metal iron (which I believe some now call a “basketball ring”).

Once I left there almost a decade ago, that kind of obsessive behavior increasingly mystified me, but my passion for the sport never waned, especially once I started covering it in a journalistic capacity.

That passion translates to my work and on this kind of a beat, it will need to. Pitt plays in arguably the best conference in college basketball and, going back to its days in the Big East, has for some time. It has made the NCAA tournament in 13 of the past 15 seasons. Its league affiliation and recent success aside, it’s a major college basketball team in a city without a professional franchise in that sport. This is a very, very important program in this city’s revered sports landscape and you can expect my coverage to reflect that.

Anyone that has followed my work with Duquesne and, before that, Robert Morris knows that I like advanced statistics, the kind of things like offensive and defensive efficiency, rebounding percentage and percentage of shots taken. For as much as I reference those numbers — and as important as I believe they are in painting a more accurate and nuanced picture of how a team is performing — you can’t fully understand the game without also relying on what you see play out on the court, the kinds of little things that gradually add up and can be the difference between a win and a loss, a successful season and a subpar one.

My main passion and the thing that guided me in this profession, though, is telling stories. These games are played and coached by people, some of whom have very unique backgrounds. I’ve encountered that in my four years in Pittsburgh covering college basketball, from the Robert Morris senior who played in the memory of a fallen friend to the Duquesne guard and assistant coach who helped each other battle through separate bouts with cancer.

I’ll be covering this team differently than Paul did because no two journalists approach their work in an identical way. But, ideally, journalism is a conversation, not a lecture. While I will have my own way of writing about Pitt, if there’s something you liked that Paul did or have any other comments, feel free to email me at cmeyer@post-gazette.com or just reach out to me on Twitter @CraigMeyerPG. As you’ll learn, I’m always happy to chat, even if it sometimes takes a little longer than I’d like to get back to you.

This is a devout sports town that, contrary to how some view it, has a lot of smart, dedicated basketball fans. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to get started.

 

Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG