How to write The Timeline Lead?

Sports writers can use a chronology to show the progress of an athlete, a team, or a sport. This can be used with the earlier date first or today’s date, then a flashback to previous months, years or conditions.

Here Christine Brennan of The Washington Post used such a lead to show how long the British team of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean has been champions of the sport of ice dancing. This article was published in February 1994, during the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

HAMAR, Norway-Ten years later, the perfect 6.0s still popped onto the scoreboard and the Union Tacks still waved in the stands.

Torvill and Dean are back, and they are precisely where they are expected to be, leading the ice dancing competition at the Winter Olympics.

With tonight’s free dance portion remaining, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean hold a slight edge over two Russian dance pairs after 50 percent of the competition. The 1984 Olympic gold medalists took the lead with an elegant original dance Sunday night at the Olympic Amphitheatre after falling behind two nights ago in the compulsory dance.

Here is another version of the timeline lead. Dave Goldberg, writer for the Associated Press, uses it well in a 1993 article about Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula.

MIAMI-Oct. 5, 1963. Don Shula is standing on the sidelines at Wrigley Field in Chicago, watching George Halas coach the Bears to a 10-3 victory over his Baltimore Colts.

“I was just in awe of him,” Shula says. “Here I was this 33- year-old rookie and I was standing there trying to coach against this legend.”

Oct. 30, 1993. Scott Mitchell, who the next day will quarterback the Miami Dolphins to the win that ties Shula with Halas for the most ever by an NFL coach, is recalling when he first met Shula in 1990.

“I was standing there when he came up to me, stuck out his hand and said ‘I’m coach Shula,'” Mitchell recalls. “Of course I knew him. I’d seen him a million times on television. I was born in 1968 and he was already a legend by then.”

Cathy Harasta uses a timeline lead in a story about UCLA- Houston basketball, 1968 style and the same teams, playing each other in 1993 for the first time since that 1968 game. Her article appeared in The Dallas Morning News on December 20, 1993, under the headline “Hayes played large role in biggest game.”

At the time, Elvin Hafyes wondered if anyone would be there for the Jan. 20, 1968, UCLA-Houston game. “Anyone” was a relative term, because some fans certainly would show for a No. 1 versus No. 2 matchup of undefeated teams.

But this game was an unusual test, not just of the Cougars, then 16-0 and ranked second, and the top-ranked Bruins (13-0). This game would chart the future of the sport. It would become a touchstone for basketball, for Hayes, for sports television, for arena management and for millions of fans.

Hayes and his Houston teammates were to be part of a new-fangled notion. Basketball never had been played in a domed stadium. Regular-season college basketball had yet to enjoy national television exposure. Nobody knew the sport’s potential, what it could be worth, or if anybody cared.

The game, in a novel building in a football state, would be known as The Game of the Century. But nobody knew it, going in.

“The players were conscious of a building of that size and magnitude,” said Hayes, whose No. 44 will be retired during a ceremony at halftime of UCLA’s game at Houston Monday night. “We wondered if there would be any people in the stands. Was anybody going to come?”