Our Sports Department is just now reeling back in the sports writers who have been on the road covering events ... and have sent another one out this week.

David Lassen, our sports columnist, was in Italy in February to cover the Olympics. It's part of a partnership we have with the Scripps Howard News Service where a number of Scripps-owned papers (like the Star) offer writers who get together as a team and cover the Olympics. They also write for their own paper. So we get our guy at the Olympics and all Scripps papers (and subscribers to the news service) get full Olympics coverage.

David took some well-earned down time after the Olympics and barely got back here, before we packed him off to Indianapolis to cover UCLA in the men's Final Four.

Sports writer Rhiannon Potkey had covered UCLA on the first two weekends of the tournament, traveling to San Diego and then Oakland. But she was already committed to going to the women's Final Four in Boston.

And now Bob Buttitta is back in August, Ga., for the second year in a row covering the Masters golf tournament. The Masters is a fairly restricted press credential and after years of applying, last year was the first time The Star received one.

The newsroom hasn't been left out of our spring trips. We have a reporter and photographer on their way to Mexico next week accompanying a local church group that spends its spring break every year helping to rebuild a Mexican community. And then, in late May, another reporter-photographer team will jet to Washington D.C. to cover our local spelling bee champ who is the first three-time Ventura County Bee winner.

It shouldn't surprise you that our staff has lots of ideas on road trips. But they cost. And we do have a travel budget we must live within each year. It's a constant juggle to try to determine which stories are the ones that are best told (or can only be told) by sending out our staff to cover them.

In Sports, for instance, all those events were covered by the wire services and we easily could have printed their stories. But we believed that our reporters brought a special focus to make those stories of greater interest to you, our readers. The men's Final Four is a great example. Most of the stories of Monday's game talked about Florida and its success. David was able to focus on how UCLA, because of its storied history, just could not settle for second place. It's a story that gave us the perspective we wanted.