The start of the quarter means the start of thinking about football games, and covering football games, and trying to figure out why each game is important, and telling you about it.

We’ll cover football and basketball like this because those are the biggest moneymakers here, and those are the sports that have the largest audience. We understand that, so that’s where most of our attention is going to focus.

But I’ve always thought that there’s no reason why The Daily shouldn’t be the best source for news about the smaller sports, ones that don’t merit quite as much regular attention from other news outlets in the Seattle area.

That’s why I went to Oklahoma City last year to cover the school’s first softball championship, that’s why we’re putting an added emphasis on the postseason in these sports, and that’s why we treat every single sport at the UW as if it’s a major beat. Because to us, it is.

Space allowing, we’ll try to have at least two stories per week about every sport during its season — cross country, track, baseball, volleyball, soccer, you name it. We want notebooks, profiles and features to be our bread and butter this quarter. The events matter, too, but it’s the people on these teams that are the real stories. We’ll do our best to make sure that we bring you the personal side of these sports, instead of just numbers and scores.

It’s going to be an interesting couple of quarters for us, in a good way. We’ll be there to bring you all the news from Steve Sarkisian’s first year as the UW head coach, a tenure that’s already been more exciting than anything we ever saw under Tyrone Willingham.

And the basketball team is expected to compete for another Pac-10 title this year, meaning most of our space come December is going to be dedicated to covering that team on its quest for a second consecutive NCAA tournament.

As with any good sports section, reader feedback is always helpful. My e-mail is at the end of this letter, and I’ll try to respond to any comments or concerns in a timely manner. After all, this is a student newspaper. We want to give you, the students, what you want.

Of course, regular features like the Battle Royale and Pac-10 power rankings will still be fixtures. We’ll try to be funny, too.

My goal is to have the best sports section in the Pac-10, which I think is realistic. We have an experienced, dedicated staff that understands the art of storytelling and understands what it means to give readers what they want.

I look forward to hearing from all of you (or, more likely, none of you).

Christian Caple, Sports Editor

sports@dailyuw.com