Jane McManus talks 'terrifying' role editing sportswriting anthology

The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024 is out now from Triumph Books. That latest volume in the long-running series (descended from the 1991-launched The Best American Sports Writing series) has veteran sports journalist and journalism teacher Jane McManus as its guest editor.

McManus recently spoke to AA about the volume and her work on it, and she said she was thrilled to see the finished product.

“It’s really so cool,” McManus said. “I have another book in the works, but this is the first brick-and-mortar book that my name’s been on. I wrote the opening essay and I got to pick all the stories. And it’s like, a year of work that shows up, it’s really gratifying to see it. I’m so used to writing like stories on deadline, and they get published, and then the next day, you’re on to the next thing. Here’s something that you can really kind of hold in your hands and savor.

“I’ve obviously read this anthology many times, and gotten it for Christmas for relatives, so I’m not unfamiliar with it. But to see it and to remember ‘Oh, she sent me that story, oh, here’s how I found this story,’ it makes it a different thing.”

Before taking on the guest editing role for this volume , McManus (known for work at ESPN, Deadspin and more, as well as being the founding executive director of the Center for Sports Media at Seton Hall and teaching at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Michigan State and Marist College) had previously served as an advisor on the 2023 edition of this series , which was edited by Richard Deitsch of The Athletic. She said taking the jump from advisor to volume guest editor gave her some pause considering how much this series means, though.

“[It was] terrifying, because it’s such a responsibility,” she said. “The thing about it, the writers in our business, they take a lot of pride in appearing in this volume. So you have a responsibility to your colleagues to fairly consider everything that you can encounter that has heft and has some seriousness to it. And also, I think it can’t just be limited to the people I know who I know do good work every year. You really have to cast a really wide net.”

She said it was crucial for her to bring in advisors (including, as she told AA’s Michael Grant earlier this year , Deitsch, J.A. Adande, Kavitha Davidson, and Sandy Padwe) to help cast that net, and to make sure they examined work from places other than traditional sports outlets.

“Having people to help me out with that is great. There are pieces in here from GQ , from Outside : they often get into this volume now, but they’re not quote/unquote sports outlets, in a way. Outside kind of is, but it’s not like Sports Illustrated , but they do a lot of good writing. So making sure that I’m reading everything that I wouldn’t necessarily always be looking for was really important.

“I just didn’t want to miss anything. And that’s what Deitsch told me when he passed the baton: he was terrified of missing a really good story and not being able to kind of give it its due.”

McManus said she thinks the anthology plays a vital role in spotlighting great work, especially at a time when many in the sports media world are facing significant challenges.

“I can’t stress how much it means not just to readers, but to people in our business. Writers are so hungry for, I think, validation, for good examples of work, and to be able to honor their peers. And as our business changes so much and it’s such a tough time to be a writer, a sports writer, I think this volume is more important than ever.”

McManus said one story in here that really stood out to her is Sally Jenkins’ much-lauded Washington Post feature on women’s tennis legends and former rivals Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova relying on each other through cancer treatment.

“If you had a different person picking these stories, they could maybe pick 20 different stories. It’s very much subject to how something hits you as a reader and as an editor. But I think everybody would have probably picked, I know everybody would have picked Sally Jenkins’ story on Chris and Martina, the story that she wrote about them relying on each other while going through cancer treatment.

“It’s just such a well-written story. There’s depth there. It shows the value of Sally’s experience and Sally’s relationships over the years, which is something that I think gets a little bit lost in today’s sports media business. It’s harder to stick around because people are asked to work longer for less as you get to a certain level of your career.

“But Sally’s been at The Washington Post forever, she has the support, she has the resources to be able to pursue a story like this, and to really spend the time with it that it needs. So that was a no-brainer.”

McManus said there was no specific theme for this year’s volume in advance, but once the pieces were selected, she was impressed with its representation of stories about women’s sports and stories from female writers.

“I didn’t realize until after I put all the stories together that I’ve probably chosen more stories about women athletes, and I think more women who are writers. I haven’t gone through and counted everything out, but there’s more good writing about women and women’s sports now than it probably has been at any point. And I kind of wanted to notice that and to pick up on that.

“There’s this great story in there by Emily Sohn from Long Lead, another outlet that I didn’t necessarily encounter. It’s about this Sports Illustrated writer from the 1960s named Virginia Kraft, who was the first full-time woman who was a writer for that outlet, and of course probably was the only one for a really long time. But she was also the big-game hunter at Sports Illustrated , back when they had a big game hunter and that was part of the deal.

“It’s just a really well-written story, but it also illuminates this little pocket. And I just thought also, ‘Wow, we’ve come such a long way from Virginia Kraft to Sally Jenkins.”

It’s notable to see McManus not only editing this volume of this series but discussing its representation, as she was one of the voices featured in a 2016 Columbia Journalism Review piece from Pete Vernon discussing some of the diversity challenges with that series. There, McManus said, “There’s this cliché that you have to see it to be it. …If you don’t somehow see yourself reflected in these accolades then you might get the impression that there’s not a big spot carved out for you,” specifically discussing how she’d received copies of the series for Christmas and was disappointed to not see many of the female journalists she admired included.

Back in 2016, there had only been one female volume editor (Jane Leavy in 2011). That’s changed since then, with Jackie MacMullan editing the 2020 edition and McManus taking the reins now. McManus said she thinks the series’ past representation challenges are part of wider representation challenges in sports media, and the changes here are part of wider changes and wider acceptance of both female sports journalists and women’s sports.

“I think it’s very much subject to your own way of looking at sports and sports writing, and what you value, and what you consider a sports story, frankly. That’s a big part of it. And I think that’s true, there hasn’t been a ton of representation. I think when this volume started you probably had  a lot of people thinking of sports writing as, you know, Hemingway and bull fighting, and looking for stories along those lines. And that’s certainly sports writing, and that’s the great history of sports writing and the tradition of sports writing. We have that as our legacy.

“But this is about expanding ideas of who is an athlete and who gets to be valued for playing sports. And there was a long time where the best sports writer at an outlet, the biggest name in an outlet, they would have found a story about women’s sports beneath them. It’s about prioritizing.”

McManus said she had some of those thoughts herself when she was asked to shift from covering the NFL to espnW columnist work.

“I was covering the NFL when ESPNw came to me and asked me to be a columnist. And there was a part of me that wondered whether or not I should say yes to that, because I knew that what I wrote that would get the best play would be what I wrote about the NFL. And so I had to kind of think ‘Well, could my career take a different direction because I choose to write about women’s sports and comment on women sports?’

“Ultimately, it didn’t matter, because that’s what I cared about and enjoyed talking about and watching, as well as men’s sports. So it wasn’t really a question mark for me. But I did think about that and the way that different kinds of writing are prioritized by different outlets, I think that hopefully that will be changing.”

Women’s sports and how they’re covered have been a hot-button topic lately, especially around the WNBA this year . McManus said it can be positive to have those discussions, though.

“I think the conversation around coverage in the WNBA is actually a good thing because it’s allowing us to think about coverage a little bit differently now,” she said. “Part of that is because you have traditional writers now moving into this space of WNBA coverage, and they weren’t there before in volume.”

And she said it was great to see this year’s volume feature a cover shot of Caitlin Clark at Iowa, showing off how important women’s basketball is becoming in general sports coverage.

“I was really gratified to see Caitlin Clark on the cover. And it could have been Angel Reese, and it could have been A’ja Wilson, there have been any number of women who who would have been really solid candidates for that. But it’s great to have a WNBA player there to kind of signal that this volume will have more of that kind of coverage.”

Read on for more on that cover choice, McManus’ thoughts on women’s sports coverage, and her own upcoming book on the business side of women’s sports.

A few years ago, a sportswriting anthology featuring a women’s basketball player on its cover might have seemed like a clear choice to try to boost a less-prominent sport. But women’s basketball in particular, and women’s sports in general, are getting more and more high-profile and mainstream discussion. And Clark in particular has indisputably been one of the biggest stories in sports in the last couple years. McManus said women’s sports are taking off to this level not because media outlets are pushing stories and coverage, but because there are great stories there that people are interested in.

“I think all you have to do is look at the ratings last year for the Final Four versus the men to see that. Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese, and that rivalry and the storytelling out of the women’s basketball tournament, it was a bigger story.

“It was organically a bigger story. Nobody had to force it. It was just that they were compelling as competitors, and they were fun to watch. It was no one’s agenda that made that happen, it was the storytelling. So I think that’s great.”

McManus said there are still growing pains with some coverage of women’s sports.

“Is coverage is where it should be? I don’t always see that. But at the same time, I’m not seeing every front page. I’m not seeing every headline, I’m not reading every website every day. It could be a little bit more, I think there’s a ways to go in getting coverage to a good level.”

But she said she does think it’s promising to see that coverage expanding and to see the interest in women’s sports and female athletes.

“The fact that longform is finding these, as Michael Lewis would say, ‘Find some compelling characters.’ He always calls people that he writes about characters. I like that you can do a deep dive on Martina and Chris Evert and have it, like, crash The Washington Post ‘s servers; it didn’t quite, you know, but it was so well-read. It absolutely crushed the rest of the stories that were in the Post [that day] because it got such wide coverage.

“And you can do that if somebody finds that valuable. I can imagine a day when I would have gone to an editor and said ‘I think we should do a big takeout on X or Y’ and got this ‘Oh, well, maybe.’ But I think now you’re getting more buy-in at every level. So if somebody comes and says ‘No, I really want to do something on this obscure sports writer from the 1960s,’ you have people who are like, ‘Yeah, let’s throw all in with that, let’s travel. Let’s do everything for that.’ And that’s great.”

The women’s sports discussion is notable for McManus on a different front, as she has her own book The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women’s Sports coming out in February from Temple University Press. (It also features Clark in an Iowa uniform on the cover, as well as tennis star Coco Gauff at the French Open.) McManus said that one has been long in the works, even before the current rise in mainstream interest in women’s sports.

“As a deadline writer, the amount of time that it takes from me finishing the the last piece of the narrative to publication is incredibly frustrating. It’s like ‘There’s still so much happening!’ It’s funny because I pitched this book in 2020, and I got a lot of question marks, like ‘Why are we going to…well, who, really…what’s the audience for a book about women’s sports?’ I got that quite a bit. And I was like, ‘Well, it’s the audience for women’s sports.’

“But, you know, you can’t convince people. And I was almost like ‘I should put this in the book, actually,’ because this is is the kind of historical reluctance that I talk about when it comes to embracing women’s sports. And I feel like the historical reluctance is kind of fading now, and that’s actually huge.”

McManus said she thinks the changes now are more about companies realizing the women’s sports market exists and can be boosted than just about fans discovering these sports.

“People have always liked watching women’s sports, there’s always been an audience there. It hasn’t been quantified, and its needs haven’t been met. And people are always looking to expand the audience around men’s sports in every possible way.

“However, fans of women’s sports have not been addressed in the same way. And I think you’re finding that has changed, that idea has changed, because people think now ‘I can make money in women’s sports.’ And that has made all the difference.”

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There’s an often-heard narrative that women’s sports are only now reaching on-field peaks and that’s why they’re drawing more interest, but McManus doesn’t buy that.

“Really what that meant wasn’t that the sports had to get better,” she said. “The WNBA, the quality of the basketball has been as high as it is now for at least a decade. People always look back like, ‘Oh, the game had to get better.’ The game got better. The game got better a long time ago. I agree, like if it’s 1997-98, yes, the quality of play was a little bit different. But now you’ve had that for a long time.”

McManus said she thinks the larger impact comes from more quantifiable data being produced on women’s sports, both from an on-field perspective around statistics and from a business point of view.

“I think what’s happening now is people are actually measuring things. Statistics have gotten better around women’s sports, number one. But also, it’s like ‘What is the total addressable market?’ That was a number that people in business, they have that number for every possible thing that you could want to sell or invest in. And it hadn’t been put together [for women’s sports].

“But, you know, Sports Innovation Labs comes around and they start doing some stuff, Wasserman comes around, they start doing stuff, and all of a sudden investors see what the value of what women’s sports is, because now there are numbers. There’s a ceiling there, people can see what the potential is from an economic standpoint. It makes all the difference.”

McManus can be followed on X @janesports . The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024 is available now .

The post Jane McManus talks ‘The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024’: ‘This volume is more important than ever’ appeared first on Awful Announcing .