A printout record of amateur league results spread across an editorial desk during a review session

Hoops Chubu Chubu / editorial desk

Editorial Standards at This Site

This page sets out how we gather information, check it, and correct it. The rules apply to every article here, including league reviews, fixture summaries and history pieces. They are written down so readers can hold us to them.

The editorial desk is small, and it would rather publish a summary late than wrong.

What counts

What counts as a source here

We prefer primary material: league and association postings, published studies, official competition records. Secondary coverage is acceptable when it points back to one of those.

Social posts and word of mouth are treated as leads, not sources. If a detail only exists as an unverified claim, we either leave it out or label it clearly in the text.

  1. A

    Primary records first

    League and association postings, published studies and official competition records carry the weight. When these exist, they decide the article.

  2. B

    Secondary coverage, traced back

    British regional basketball is often covered by local writers first. We accept that coverage when it cites a record we can reach ourselves, and we follow the trail instead of quoting the writer.

  3. C

    Leads stay labelled

    A conversation at a regional fixture can point us somewhere useful. It does not become a source. Anything still unverified at publication is marked as such in the sentence, not in a footnote.

On fixtures

Amateur calendars move all year. Our aim is a schedule that is right at the moment we publish it, not one that claims to stay right.

Fixture verification

Fixture information is checked against the league or association that administers the competition before we publish a schedule summary. Where a date is provisional, we say so. Where two sources disagree, we post the official one and note the discrepancy rather than picking silently.

Provisional dates

Where a governing body marks a round as subject to change, the summary carries that wording too. The reader learns the shape of the calendar, not a date that will quietly fail them.

Disagreements

When a club notice and a league notice name different venues or times, the league decision is published and the gap between the two is stated in the summary.

Late changes

A change after publication is not chased down every hour. It is caught on the next pass through the calendar, and the article is corrected rather than replaced.

Always check a fixture with the association before travelling to a game.

A fixture sheet pinned beside a stopwatch and whistle in a community gym corridor

Fixtures & schedules

Regional calendars are published round by round, not all at once.

That is why our schedule summaries are dated. The regional sports leagues we follow announce their rounds as the season turns, and we report what sits in the record that week.

Regional fixtures and schedules

League descriptions

When we describe how a league is structured, we work from the administering body's own material. That means divisions, promotion rules and entry requirements come from the league or association rather than from club folklore.

Where the structure is unclear, we say the structure is unclear. An honest gap is more useful to a reader than a confident guess.

Divisions and grading

The tier a club sits in, and the rules that move it up or down, are taken from the league handbook. We do not reconstruct a ladder from the impression a season leaves.

Entry requirements

Eligibility wording comes from the association that runs the competition, quoted plainly. Where a rule has changed between seasons, we note which season the wording applies to.

Where the record stops

Some regional sports leagues publish less than others. When a structure is documented only in fragments, the article says so instead of tidying the fragments into a clean diagram.

Bound amateur sports yearbooks and loose bulletins on a table under a reading lamp

Old records, read slowly

Where the record is thin, the history piece reflects that. A directory entry from a past season can settle a question that three later summaries get wrong.

Grassroots sports history

Historical claims

History pieces are held to the same standard. A claim about how a competition developed needs something behind it: a record, a directory entry, a published account. We avoid tidy origin stories, since grassroots sport rarely has a clean founding moment.

For local sports history in particular, the honest version of a story is often messier than the version that gets retold. When a founding date cannot be pinned to a record, the article carries the uncertainty forward instead of smoothing it away.

The same restraint applies to school and street basketball writing. A story about a school basketball training culture is more useful when it describes the sessions and the surroundings that are documented, and leaves the legends where they belong.

How we name things

Named organisations

When we name a league, association or school, we are describing it factually and within what is documented. A county association's role in a competition is a fact worth stating. An assessment of how good that association is would be an opinion dressed as reporting, so we leave it out.

What we will write

  • Which body administers a competition, and what its published role is.

  • How a league divides its season across divisions and rounds.

  • What a documented entry requirement says, and which season it applies to.

  • Where a record is incomplete, and what part of the picture is missing.

What we will not

  • Rank one organisation against another in a comparison table.

  • Publish an assessment of an organisation that we cannot support with a record.

  • Repeat a claim about a school, club or association just because it circulates widely.

  • Let a nickname or a shorthand stand in for the name a body uses for itself.

Corrections

Corrections are made when we get something wrong, and substantive ones are noted rather than quietly edited. If a fixture date, league detail or historical claim is incorrect, send it to the editorial desk with a source.

We will check it and update the article. Repeated errors from the same source are treated as a reason to stop using that source.

The simplest report names the article, the sentence that is wrong, and where the correct detail is documented.

How a report is handled

  1. Received

    The report lands with the editorial desk and is logged against the article it concerns.

  2. Checked

    The record behind the disputed detail is located again, in the same primary material used the first time.

  3. Updated

    If the article is wrong, the text is rewritten and the correction is noted in the article itself, not buried in a separate page.

  4. Tracked

    A source that keeps producing errors stops being used for amateur sports updates on this site.

Reports are read by a person. There is no automatic reply, and the desk does not argue a correction down once a record supports it.

What we do not publish

Nothing on this site is written to move a reader toward a purchase, because there is nothing here to purchase. There are no sponsored articles, no paid placements and no affiliate content.

We also do not publish rumours about individuals, and we do not report on amateur players' personal circumstances. Coverage stays on competition, structure and history — the parts of grassroots sports that belong to everyone watching and playing.

A grassroots sports review here means a review of a league, a season or a record. It does not mean a review of a person.

No sponsored articles

Every article here is written because the subject is worth documenting, not because a party asked for coverage.

No paid placements

Space on the page is not available to buy, and no league or club can pay for a mention in a summary.

No affiliate content

No link on this site is written to earn from a reader's next step. There are no tracked links in our articles.

Nothing about private lives

Amateur players are not public figures. Their circumstances stay out of the coverage, whatever the rumour.

Independence and funding

The site carries no advertising and takes no payment for coverage. That removes a set of pressures that shape a lot of sports writing. It also means the editorial desk is small and slow, which is why we would rather publish a fixture summary late than wrong.

The same restraint sets the tone for our amateur league reviews and our schedules. If something is provisional, unrecorded or simply unknown, the page says so. That is the standard, and it applies from the first fixture list of the season to the last history piece we write about a school gym in the regions.