Winner Take All: Championship Rugby

I chose to live-tweet a championship rugby game involving my son’s team. A sports story has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and lends itself well to suspense, so it seemed like a good event to try.

THE STORY IN A NUTSHELL

After a season in which I didn’t actually get to many matches (parenting fail!) I finally had a chance to watch my son compete in the U16 rugby championship. I only know the very basics of rugby and had to rely on the spectators around me to figure out what was happening, but even I could tell the first half didn’t go well.

In the second half, my son’s team tied it up, then pulled ahead, but at the very last minute had a penalty called against them and had to hope the other team missed the kick. Thankfully the kick was no good, time ran out, and my son’s team were crowned champions. It was almost like a movie.

Yep, that’s my son with the tampons in his nose

STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES I USED

The question of who would win the championship drove the suspense. It was interesting to write from a perspective of not knowing the ending; even I was invested in finding out what happened, so I tried to make the reader feel the same way.

I kept the posts short, wrote in a casual style, and used sentence fragments for the most part, much like a play-by-play situation. But I deliberately set out not to just parrot the action. To provide value with each post like Eric Goldschein advised, I tried to entertain the reader or add interesting context to the unfolding events. I also added visual elements including photos, gifs, and emojis.

Following a Hootsuite tip on live-tweeting and writing for social media, I even created a poll to engage the audience and provoke a response.

THE OVERALL EXPERIENCE

The agony of watching your kid compete and not knowing how things will turn out is a universal theme that I think a lot of people can relate to, and I enjoyed experimenting with the live-tweeting format. I’m not a very visual thinker (or writer), so this was a challenging but interesting project.