Rewinding the shot clock: Republic athletic director Mark Faller
As longtime Republic athletic director Mark Faller prepares to retire after a good Final Four run in the Valley, we take a look back at an earlier episode of Shot Clock discussing a previous March Madness tournament.
The Republic
Sport is always about transition.
There is a transition from one season to another. In hockey and soccer, the constant transition from offense to defense and vice versa is the flow of these sports. The NBA even has statistical categories that track and measure the transition offense and defense.
Here at The Arizona Republic, we’re starting our own transition today.
The Sunday newspaper you read has a new look and feel, and the sports section is part of that transformation, built on visually arresting imagery and strong local journalism that showcases the depth of our coverage of the most important teams, personalities and developments in Arizona sports .
The goal is for this newly invented product to work in tandem with our website, azcentral.com, the home page for breaking news and live sports. The Sunday Newspaper Experience will complement all of this by showcasing the expertise of our staff, spending time with stories that look forward and celebrate our shared past. It will be full of opinion pieces, strong feature writing and team analysis.
It will be something of a Sunday magazine, a place to spend some time looking at a topic or exploring the rich history of Arizona sports.
That transition was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Regular readers of The Republic understand that nightly events and live coverage are no longer something a print newspaper can own. And really, there’s no reason not to, not with our vibrant website and social media reporting in real time everything sports fans are looking for. This is also part of the transition — providing print readers with quick access to our digital content via QR codes.
We believe this edition of the new Sunday Republic shows what you can expect every weekend.
As we bring you this new experience, there is one more transition I need to share.
This edition is the last Sunday paper under my watch as sports editor of The Republic. I’m retiring after just shy of 44 years in journalism, the last 21 here in Phoenix, where I’ve hopefully helped make sense of the evolving scene in one of America’s greatest sports cities.
There’s just no place that comes close to what we have here, even if our professional teams don’t achieve much of the time. Since arriving in the fall of 2003, I have covered six college football championship or semifinal games, four Super Bowls (including the 2009 Tampa Cardinals), four NASCAR Cup championship games, four WNBA Finals, the of the NBA, the World Series, the Pac-12 Football Championship Game and the MLB, NBA and NFL All-Star Games. Add to that the Cactus League, the world’s most attended golf tournament, countless bowl games and professional playoffs, and a robust local high school and college sports scene.
Wow!
It’s what brought me here in the first place, this steady stream of events that regularly put Phoenix in the spotlight. What I didn’t expect – and what turned out to be the ultimate benefit of working here – was how great the people are, both in my professional and personal life, and how amazing it is to experience the West.
It was in Flagstaff when the Cardinals spent summer camps there. Watching the Diamondbacks play at three of their NL West rivals’ ballparks (and Denver, you’re next). It was watching the Coyotes play in LA and Anaheim and visiting Camp Tontozona, the site of Arizona State Football’s annual pilgrimage.
Being a newspaper (and website) sports editor has been a more exciting journey than I could have imagined when the opportunity first arose almost 35 years ago. I was an NFL beat writer covering the New York Giants for the Bridgeport (Conn.) Post, but that ended when the company went in a new direction. The publisher called me into their office and said they had a new position for me: sports assignment and layout editor. I thought for a moment and answered something along the lines of, isn’t that what a sports editor does? He smiled. I’m pretty sure this was a test to see how I would handle the transition (that word again). In less than a month, he went all the way and hired me as sports editor.
Over the years, I’ve never lost sight of the fact that our job is to connect readers with the teams and sports they love. We have insider access that they can only dream of, and even in this 24/7 era of content generation, where teams have practically opened their doors to the public more than ever before, what we do still matters. How we report and analyze the news, how we interact with readers, remains vital to the sports arena. We are still independent. We stand for nothing but good stories to tell, great personalities to cover. Of course, local teams winning is great because it brings us more readers and fans. So if the Suns are going to be in the playoffs, we can hope they go all the way!
You hear retiring athletes talk about the thing they’ll miss the most is being with their teammates, and it’s the same for me. The people we meet and work with change our lives. For me, it’s a very long list of people who have made this trip so special: I’ve been amazed and challenged by incredible journalists at the three newspapers I’ve worked for; meeting athletes, coaches and administrators along the way; and even establishing relationships with “regular readers,” as Stephen King calls them, people who don’t just complain when we get something wrong or don’t cover a story, but want to understand what we’re doing and offer constructive feedback. I’m here to tell you that we wouldn’t want it any other way.
From now on I will join you all on the sidelines. No, that’s not quite right. With our friends at The Republic and azcentral showing the way, we have front row seats and insider access to the good, the bad and everything in between.
Otherwise, you can find me on a hiking trail or in a national park, wherever the mood takes me. As Johnny Cash once sang, “From now on I’m free to do whatever I want.”
See you at the stadium.
