Much attention has been given about the Woods Cross-Bountiful football game that occurred nearly two weeks ago.

The attention, of course, was due to the fact that we, the local paper, decided NOT to run a coverage story about the game itself.

Let me be the first to apologize for the non-coverage, but there are some things that people need to know about our paper that ultimately led to the decision of not running a story.

When the decision was made to once again move from a twice-a-week publication (publishing on Wednesday’s and Sunday’s) to a once-a-week Thursday edition, many meetings were held about the way the paper was going to cover sports.

Those meetings, held between myself, the publisher and the executive editor, discussed in great detail about how the sports department was to cover Friday night games.

After several weeks of giving Friday night football games story coverage in the following week’s issues, we came to the decision to no longer run coverage stories about our local teams simply because we felt that Friday night games would be considered “old news” by the time our publication hit your doorsteps on the following Thursday issue.

Instead, our game plan changed to allow for more space to talk about the upcoming games.

These preview-type stories, which included the game of the week, attempted to cover the strengths and weaknesses of both teams, and included quotes from coaches and other statistical measures that readers were starting to warm up to.

Post-game coverage was therefore put on the back burner, unless of course there were Tuesday afternoon games.

Those games were considered slightly more up-to-date than any previous Thursday or Friday game, and therefore were given the OK for story coverage.

These changes, as many of our readers have already noticed, have also came not only for the sports section, but for the regular news section as well.

The decision not to cover one of the biggest rivalry games in the state was a joint decision based on the aforementioned reasons, along with the way we were “changing the guard” of the way we as a local newspaper cover high school sports as a whole.

These types of decisions have happened to the Davis Clipper in all aspects, including sports.

It may be a tough transition for our readers, but our goal is to provide the most up-to-date sports that we possibly can while maintaining that these rivalries still exist in the community.

While this may not be a clear clarification as to why the rivalry game didn’t garner story coverage, this will hopefully offer a clearer understanding of the way local sports will be covered in the future.