March Madness has become Christmas for sportswriters who love cliches.
Each spring, journalists unwrap their favorite tired sayings, worn phrases and repetitive platitudes to describe the NCAA Basketball Tournament. (translation: The Big Dance.)
An each year, sports writers believe these cliches add pop, zing, and glitz when they really deflate journalism credibility by revealing how far they’ve bought into the sales pitch. Our job is not to promote but to inform and entertain – sometimes in the same story.
Unlike basketball, the NCAA wrestling championships this weekend are not called the Big Grapple, last weekend’s NCAA ski championships were not called the Big Slalom, and the indoor track and field championships are not called the Big Hurdle. (For the record, Iowa is seeking its third straight wrestling title.)
Yet, we continuously dance with basketball. Bubble teams either burst or float. Cinderella teams upset the big dogs. And writers try to point out the x-factors. More than 350 articles included ‘big dance’ in a Google search tonight.
Please, avoid these overly used phrases. Instead, do something really crazy and refer to the event as a ‘tournament’ and call surprising victories ‘upsets.’ Avoid this march toward madness by focusing on the key plays, analyzing trends within games and finding intriguing story lines. Those will be stories worth reading.
How best to turn yourself from sports fan to professional sports journalist? Quickly moving beyond general guidance about sports writing, Joe Gisondi focuses on the nitty-gritty, with hands-on, practical advice on covering 20 specific sports. From auto racing to wrestling, you’ll find tips on the seemingly straightforward—where to stand on the sideline and how to identify a key player—along with the more specialized—figuring out shot selection in lacrosse and understanding a coxswain’s call for a harder stroke in rowing. Preparing you for just about any game, match, meet, race, regatta or tournament you’re likely to cover, Field Guide to Covering Sports is the ideal go-to resource to have on hand as you master the beat. You can 
Click on the link 
[...] cliches like the plague. Don’t write that teams are ‘on fire,’ that a team ‘flipped [...]
[...] Cliches are fun to say, but difficult to understand, especially to readers who have just started following a sport. We can’t write just to insiders or the newer fans will stop reading along, frustrated and confused. That’s why sports journalists need to be more precise. To assist in that quest, here are some tips to improve writing about baseball: [...]