How sports reports are sourced
What a report is written from
Pitt women’s soccer. Each report is written from two documents: the Pitt Athletics game recap and the official box score. Scores, scorers, minutes and records are checked against the box score and against the opponent’s own official record of the game. No blog, social post or reference site is used for any fact, and a report does not rely on a recording of the match.
WPIAL girls soccer playoffs. Each report is written under two tiers of sources. The official WPIAL bracket controls the score, date, site and advancement. Named published game reports supply goal detail and quotations, and every report is drafted from a claims sheet before any prose is written.
Pittsburgh Riveters. Each report is written from the club recap and match notes, which are the official record, and checked against Pittsburgh Soccer Now as an independent source. Because the club is an interested source, a fact that reflects well on the club is printed only when the independent source or a count from the scoring summaries supports it. Where a figure comes only from Pittsburgh Soccer Now, such as an attendance, the report says so.
NWSL playoffs. Each report is built from the official club match reports, which carry the scoring summary, lineups and attendance, and from the Associated Press wire record. Local and national game stories and a commercial data feed serve as cross-checks. The league site publishes no per-match box score, so attendance is cited to the club match report. Where sources disagree, such as a scoring minute or a kickoff time, the report follows the official scoring summary and the changelog says so.
Links in the text. The score in a report’s first sentence links to the primary record for the result, and the scoring line at the end links to the box score or match notes behind it. Where a report names a source, such as Pittsburgh Soccer Now, the name links to that article.
Sources on every report. Each report ends with a Sources section that links the pages and documents the report was written from. The links are the record behind the report, not a reading list.
What is not claimed
A report written from a recap or published game reports does not describe what the writer did not see. Quotations appear only when a named person said the words in a published source. Where a source gives only a half and not a minute for a goal, the scoring summary says so.
Images
Pages carry no team, league or wire photographs unless the publisher’s permission is on file for that image.
Corrections
A mistake in a score, name, time or statistic is corrected on the page with the date and the change, in the page’s changelog, as on every other page of this site. See corrections.