I’ve waited five semesters for this moment. I’ve written stories about 13 Kent State teams for five different sports editors. I’ve traveled as far west as San Francisco, as far south as Chapel Hill, N.C., and as far to the middle of nowhere as Omaha, Neb.

All for this.

Today I am officially the sports editor of the Daily Kent Stater, and I’m looking forward to doing the best job I can in this role.

In my five semesters of working for the sports staff, I’ve seen good things and bad things. I’ve seen some things that work and some things that don’t. I’ve seen some sports pages I’ve kept to this day and some I’d rather forget.

Now it’s my responsibility to keep doing what we’ve done well and either improve or eliminate what we’ve done poorly. It’s a responsibility I accept and look forward to.

The Stater has taken great strides online in the past few semesters. Last spring, we began live blogging games at the Mid-American Conference Tournament. This spring, we will live blog nearly every men’s basketball game and several women’s games.

In the fall, we added a separate blog section to KentNewsNet.com, but our updating was sporadic at best. This spring, we will try to improve the process by having regular updates and assigned bloggers for both major college and professional sports.

In addition to that online work, you will be able to visit KentNewsNet.com on the weekends to see updates on how the Flashes’ sports teams fared in their Friday, Saturday and Sunday competition.

But there’s more to my job description than just updating our Web site. I can’t forget about the print copy of the sports section while I work online.

In my biased opinion, the sports staff has done an outstanding job in previous semesters. We’ve expanded our coverage without sacrificing our writing quality. It’s my job to continue that.

For example, our coverage is always much better when we attend an event (imagine that). With that in mind, we try to travel to as many road games as we can.

To this point, we’ve done a pretty good job of going to away games in the “big two” sports – football and men’s basketball. However, we haven’t gone to as many road games in other sports.

I want to change that. There’s no reason we can’t travel to women’s basketball games, gymnastics meets or wrestling matches if the distance is within reason. I’ll make this promise: If we can make the trip, we will make the trip.

Those are the major goals I have for this semester, and I think that’s a good start.

However, I’m not arrogant enough to believe I know I everything that is good and bad with the Daily Kent Stater sports page. That’s where you come in.

It seems as though we ask for reader feedback every semester. However, I’m going to keep the broken record going by asking for it again.

I want to know what you think about the job we’re doing. I want to know what you think we can do better and what you’d like to see more of in the newspaper and online. I check my e-mail approximately 750 times each day and will read and respond to any e-mails you send me.

But I’d like for your feedback to extend past more than just e-mails. I’d love for you to comment on our stories and participate in our live blogs. It will make everything better because otherwise, we’re just talking to ourselves.

I’ve waited five semesters to call the sports section “my sports section.” But now that I have the chance, I realize something:

This is your sports section more than mine. I work for you.

What do you want to see?

Contact sports editor Doug Gulasy at [email protected].