By Leslie Tan/Red Sports

Every so often, I would read within this website a charge of bias or neglect levelled against Red Sports. I can understand the feeling. You come in here, can’t find your sport, and think nobody cares. Or you come in here, your team isn’t covered, and you feel neglected.

I used to work in the sports broadcast industry and soon realised a rather disturbing fact – that it was cheaper for Mediacorp to buy a foreign sports programme than to produce one about local sports. That’s why back then, they would run sports shows about the World Poker Championship that cost $500 per show rather than spend more money putting together a programme about Singapore sports. It’s called globalisation.

I presume the same law of economics also applies to the newspapers and magazines here. It’s cheaper to buy the stories about the English Premier League from the wire agencies like Reuters and stick it ad nauseum in the New Paper or the Straits Times than hire more staff to go and cover local Singapore sports in any great detail. It’s called globalisation.

From the day I began this site on February 1, 2007, I set out to tell a Singapore sports story. I also knew that it was a daunting prospect. If billion-dollar entities like the Straits Times, The New Paper and the rest of the SPH newspapers don’t cover Singapore sports in any great depth or detail, what made me think I could do it?

And of course, I couldn’t. For every story I told, 20 would go untold. For every picture of a player I took, a lot more players would go unnoticed.

So from day one, I declared, “If you send your story, I’ll post your story.” Why? Because, at the end of the day, you know your story best. And bright, articulate people sending stories from all over this little island will always beat one old man here trying to spit out a story every day.

What I am doing now is to train young writers and shooters for free to cover the sports scene so that the talent pool of sports journalists and photographers gets larger. That way, more stories will get told.

I started this site because I believe the Singapore sports story needs to be told with many voices, and not just mine.

In the last year or so, a few good men and women have stepped up:

Lai Jun Wei, Innova Junior College alumni, in National Service
Tan Huey Ying, Victoria Junior College alumni, waiting to enter university
Jolyn Ang, Victoria Junior College
Ng Cheng Cong, Temasek Polytechnic
Marvin Lowe, Singapore Management University
Ian Chew, Catholic High
Adnan Md Taip, National University of Singapore
Harley Tay, a parent
Wee Ban Bee, ACS old boy who covers ACS rugby games
Nicholina Chua, a full-time working adult and touch rugby fan
Yang Yue Heng, Raffles Institution
Muhammad Hannan, Temasek Polytechnic alumni, in National Service
Cheot Yee Chien, Tampines Junior College
Lam Chun See, a parent
Qing Shan, Catholic High
Joseph Chin, Anderson Junior College alumni
Tsang Wing Han, Nanyang Technological University

This list is not exhaustive and they of course do not write and shoot every week. But the point is this: if we chip in to tell the stories, we will have a site that we can call home, that captures our experiences out there on the field of play for posterity, that reminds us of where we come from.

Do Singaporeans read? Yes, they do. Last month, redsports.sg hit a new high of 101,546 unique visits and 421,617 page views. But they are just numbers. What’s more important is behind those numbers – Singaporeans who are keen to read about the Singapore sports story because the stories are our own, and not those of EPL footballers earning one million Singapore dollars a month living in a fantasy world of drugs, prostitutes and fast cars.

Red Sports is dedicated to telling the Singapore sports story.

Add your own voice.

Red Sports. Always Game.

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REDSPORTS.SG statistics for the first four months of 2008. (Figures from statcounter.com)