A sports story is, basically, just another kind of news story, and the simplest way to write it is to use the traditional "5Ws and an H" news lead. The opening paragraph should tell WHO did WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, and, sometimes, HOW. (Actually, the WHY part is often obvious and may not have to be stated explicitly.)
Thus a story about a 2-1 socccer victory by the International School boys team over Cambridge might go as follows:
"The International boys varsity soccer team started its season on a winning note, defeating Cambridge 2-1 Thursday afternoon on the Griffins home field by scoring twice in the second half while a tenacious defense kept the Knights out of scoring range most of the game."
That has it all -- who, what, where, when, why and how.
The next paragraph might pick up some of the highlights -- who scored the goals, how the game fit into the long rivalry between the schools, how the outcome affected the League standings. Stuff that somebody just skimming the story might like to know. For instance. if Cambridge missed two penalty shots in the last minute of the game, or something like that, you might want to mention that up here in the "top" part of the story.
We have used a soccer game as an example. A volleyball game would be done the same way, except that sometimes it's necessary to have a second sentence if the set scores are complicated. But the point is to get all the key facts in at the beginning, even if you are trying some artful different kind of opening (see below).
The rest of the article simply tells the story of the game. The wonderful thing about sports writing is that a game naturally has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You don't have to construct some sort of logical chain to link things together (as is the case in some other kinds of writing).
Now this doesn't mean we tell everything that happened. We give a general picture of the action, skipping over the dull parts and zeroing in on a couple of key moments that were crucial to the outcome. (Sometimes it's just one key moment, with the rest of the game just sketched in lightly.)
And that's all there is to it. You're done. These stories can be written (and are written on some newspapers) by a computer. You feed in the facts. It spits out the story. (This is usually done for high school games on big papers that have to cover dozens of such games.)
However, there are other ways to start the story that might make it a little more interesting or exciting. The only limit is your skill as a writer. Say that the Cooperative Jaguars were leading the International Griffins 3-1 with only five minutes left to play in a game. Say that the Jaguars scored three goals in those five minutes and won the game 4-3. (This really happened, by the way.)
Why not start the story like this:
"The Cooperative boys varsity soccer team came back from the dead Thursday afternoon."
That would get people's attention, which is the real first rule of writing. And it would fulfill all the requirements of newswriting so long as we got the score, where and when the game was played, and at least some hint of how the Jaguars managed this amazing comeback into the next paragraph. (In news writing, almost every sentence is a paragraph.)
The opening of the story can get even more complex and literary than that. Consider the most famous sports lead ever written. It was by a sports writer named Grantland Rice, and (eventually) it told how Notre Dame University won a football game against the US Military Academy. It went like this:
"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below."
But remember, he was a professional. You may not want to try that at home. At least not right away.
