Keith Taylor: There have been plenty of changes in 30 years of covering University of Kentucky sports

Has it been three decades?

Like many of you, I grew up watching and following the Kentucky Wildcats. In my era, watching games live was a treat, while watching them on tape-delay, especially football, seemed to be the norm.

Considering we didn’t have cable, with the exception of a spider web satellite dish back in the mid-1980s, we watched sports on local networks when visibility was good on our antenna attached to the roof. A lot of times, I would have to climb up the roof and turn it a certain way to receive the proper signal for a certain channel.

Earlier this week at the Mark Stoops press conference prior to the team’s season opener against Southern Mississippi, it marked the beginning of 31 years of covering the Wildcats. I’ve covered six football coaches and this season will be the fifth men’s basketball coach once the Mark Pope era officially begins in November.

There have been a lot of changes since then, mostly in the technology side of things. Back in 1994, we didn’t have laptops and all of our cameras used film, which you had to develop in the darkroom. We used mostly old IBM desktops and the internet didn’t come around until approximately a couple of years later.

My interviews were conducted with a micro-cassette tape and every interview was transcribed slowly and carefully – play, pause, rewind, wash, rinse and repeat. I did a lot of shorthand writing and learned to memorize a lot of interviews, considering tight deadlines. If I covered a game on the road, I would write out the story on paper at the hotel and call in the game the next morning to the editor.

Thankfully, desktop computers transitioned to laptops, which made it easier to write while on deadline. However, in the early era of laptops, we used phone lines and dial-up DSL to transmit stories, which took time as well.

I can still remember sending my stories back to the paper two weeks before 9/11 when I flew to Mount Pleasant, Mich., to cover an Eastern Kentucky University football game as late coach Roy Kidd was chasing his 300th career win. It was my first plane ride and I didn’t have a lot of time to spare because of tight layover times before flying.

Soon thereafter, technology became faster and faster. I started covering games with a paper, pencil and tape recorder, but now, I basically carry my office with me in my backpack. I have several pens, three digital recorders, a laptop, sometimes an iPad and I still carry notepads. I may be the one of a handful of journalists who still record play-by-play, even though they are provided to us on paper.

Those note-taking skills came in handy during the pandemic as most schools ended the practice of handing out statistics and notes on copy paper during any given sporting event. Instead, we relied on the computer screen. I still like getting those notes and statistics on paper, so I can circle and take my own notes to fall back on while writing a story on deadline.

On Saturday, it will be year No. 31 covering the Cats in some capacity and it never gets old. Time flies when you’re having fun and it’s still brings me joy to do what I love.

Keith Taylor is sports editor of Kentucky Today, where this column first appeared.

The post Keith Taylor: There have been plenty of changes in 30 years of covering University of Kentucky sports appeared first on NKyTribune .