The National’s department has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) with top-10 awards for daily, Sunday and special sections from 2011.

This used to be known as a “triple crown” but apparently a website category has been created, and papers now seek a “grand slam.” (Maybe we will enter the website category, too, a year hence.)

Anyone who has spent time in U.S. sports departments knows that the APSE competition, for all its flaws, has always been considered a very big deal for a very long time. Reputations rose and fell on the results.

If you are an American journalist, your first question might be … “What is a newspaper from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, doing in the APSE competition?”

This is what happened.

One of the first things Robert Mashburn, former sports editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, did after being named sports editor at The National, in April of 2010, was convince management to subscribe to the AP wire. We became a member of The Associated Press, that is, and as newspaper executives can tell you, that involves sending significant amounts of money to The AP.

He wanted access to AP global sports coverage but also to the North American day-to-day sports coverage AP provides, with the idea of improving our bit of U.S./Canada coverage and broadening our wire-news choices.

One day it occurred to him that perhaps, as an AP subscriber, The National could compete in the APSE competition. He inquired. The answer from APSE officials was “yes.”

A year ago, I’m not sure we competed across the spectrum of categories, but one of our writers, Ahmed Rizvi, was cited for a story he did about result-fixing in cricket.

This year, we made more entries in more categories, even knowing that two of the three sports we cover most thoroughly — cricket and rugby — would not resonate with the APSE judges, who might also be put off by the volume of our soccer coverage.

We entered the 30,000-75,000 category of competition,  as befitting our circulation, and in the results here you can see “The National, Abu Dhabi” popping up three times in section competition.

Also, Chuck Culpepper of our staff was one of the 10 writers cited in the all-circulation “project reporting” competition, for his four-part series on Manny Pacquiao, with whom he spent most of a week in the Philippines, ahead of a fight in Las Vegas.

Chuck is currently in China covering the Volvo Ocean Race, a round-the-world sailing event that has so far taken him to Italy, Portugal, Spain and South Africa.

Our Formula One writer, who has perhaps the greatest beat in sports journalism, covers every race in the F1 series, traveling to such far-flung places as Kuala Lumpur to Monte Carlo to Sao Paolo.

I have been to Lebanon and Qatar for soccer coverage, and will go to Uzbekistan next month, inshallah.

All this to point out that our coverage can seem quite exotic.

An interesting aspect of this is … the Americans on The National’s sports staff (five of us, counting the photo editor) find there citations quite interesting and even rewarding. We all worked hard in years past, while in the States, to get recognition from the annual contest.

The majority of our staff, which is British and South Asian, I’m sure has no clear idea what this is about, and may not have even decided how they feel about being judged a “top-10” section (daily, Sunday and special) in the U.S. in the 30,000-75,000 category.

I am not a reader of the sportsjournalists.com site, but I understand some contributors expressed consternation after The National’s citations came up. Someone apparently mentioned “outsourcing” the competition, which is a fair comment. But The National is written in English, and is a member of The AP. (And, let’s get modern here: the world is a very small place these days.)

It could also be noted that in the early 1990s, Sandy Bailey of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune was the president of APSE. Was that “outscourcing” the group’s leadership?

The National may have been the first overseas newspaper subscriber to AP to want to compete in the APSE contest. Another may never come along. And if some do, would that be bad?

Another fair comment could be made (based on information that American sports editors probably do not have) … is how the size of our staff exceeds those of U.S. sections of comparable circulation — as can be seen in The National sports team photo I posted recently.

Flip side? We cover a nation of 8 million people, and that level of staffing is what it takes to get it done. We may not have major metro circulation, but our approach to news is similar to many of the biggest U.S. newspapers. We are, in fact, a national newspaper.

I believe it doesn’t hurt for U.S. sports editors to see how we roll in the UAE, and perhaps to note that we do some pretty good newspapering.

We have a good product here. It is in many ways distinct — a British-oriented section covering sports in an Arab country. But a good section, one people want to read, is a good section wherever it might be found. It is nice that APSE’s judges  noticed.