If you flipped over to the back page of last Monday’s paper, you would have come across a large picture of Steve Sexton on the sports page. Sexton, a second-year graduate student, is a talented athlete with Olympic aspirations on the Cal Triathlon Club.

Summer provides a great opportunity for the Daily Cal to cover stories such as Sexton’s. The sports section only publishes once a week in the summer compared to five days a week in the fall and spring semesters, but it allows the section the ability to produce more features on teams and athletes.

Although much of the coverage in the fall and spring is dedicated to the 27 Division I teams on campus, the Daily Cal recognizes there are athletes at UC Berkeley with noteworthy accomplishments for club teams.

Last week, ESPN.com featured “a few of the best non-NCAA-sanctioned programs in the country.” Its first article was on the Cal rugby team, winners of 14 of the last 15 national championships, including a 37-7 win over BYU in May. While the Daily Cal assigns a beat writer to the rugby team because it is a Division I sport, ESPN.com’s coverage serves as a reminder that there are often teams and athletes that are overlooked by the media. It’s great to see a national media organization like ESPN be mindful of less prominent sports. Read the rest of this entry »

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