In the over-educated precincts of the Five College community, hip-deep as it is in novelists, biographers and historians, sports writing ranks way down the literary pecking order, somewhere close to e-mail traffic or publicity blurbs.

Which does not seem to bother Will Ryan one bit. He enjoys his encounters with Hampshire College students enrolled in classes he teaches in creative writing in the social sciences and the history of sports writing. Although he does not have an academic appointment, he likes the niche he has carved out for himself. He said: "I’m tickled pink. There’s a lot of freedom. I’m lucky to do this."

"Just because sports are fun, it doesn’t mean that sports are not serious," he says. "Cultural tension comes up in sports, long before they show up in the culture in general."

He has found that in their writing assignments for his courses Hampshire students "feel passionately about their subject. They write from their own experience. I try to avoid telling students what not to write."

As if to reinforce his enthusiasm for his students and their approach to sports writing, during a recent interview, Ryan read aloud extensive sections from papers prepared for his class. As he read, it was clear he relishes the work of the students. "What I try to do is to teach kids how to do things, as much as what to do. I think the more you care about what you write, the better you write."

Of sports writing today, he said: "It’s good, it’s very good," especially when it reveals what he refers to as that critical fusion of sports and social issues or aspects of our cultural life.

Much of Ryan’s own writing derives from his life-long embrace of the outdoor life, especially as represented by fishing and to a lesser extent now by hunting.

He has written two books on fishing and is working on a third, this one about the history of black duck hunting. Over the years, he has written numerous pieces for major hunting and fishing magazines, - the Big Three - Outdoor Life, Field and Stream and Sports Afield - and now does a regular column for "Gray’s Sporting Journal," a slick quarterly.

His column for Gray’s Quarterly is called Traditions, in which he tracks down and edits sports-related pieces that are beyond the 75-year copyright and thus can be reproduced, to which he appends a 300-word personal essay or rumination.

One recent issue had a piece by the legendary writer of mysteries Earle Stanley Gardner, who started out as a sports writer, on bow hunting, which was first published in 1925.

Another recent piece was by Robert Barnwell Roosevelt - Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle - writing in 1866 about a pre-Civil War trip to the New Jersey shore, which was one of the first pieces of writing about the phenomenon that has come to be known as a "vacation."

Ryan says he spends a good deal of time at the UMass library looking for appropriate pre-1927 material for the Traditions articles, which try to illuminate that union where sports and civic life or culture join.

Ryan, who lives in the Ryan Road section of Florence, grew up in the upstate New York city of Watertown, a region best known for its awesome snow accumulations and as the home of the late cult writer Frederick Exley.

Now 51, Ryan’s formative years were shaped by the outdoors in a rural area where his father, a teacher, raised bird dogs and his mother, also a teacher, came from a farm family. He occasionally still goes fishing and sometimes hunting with kids he knows from the first grade. His affection for his hometown even extends to his e-mail address: wtownwill.

Eventually. he headed off to college at the University of Vermont where he also earned a master’s degree in education. He taught at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vt. for a few years and also at a high school. But more importantly he also started writing a biweekly fishing column for a small newspaper back in Malone, N.Y., at $5 per article.

By 1978, he had begun graduate work at UMass where he came under the influence of the noted historian and biographer Stephen Oates, author of a number of important books in the field of American studies.

Of Oates, Ryan says: "He showed me you can write serious material for a general audience."

By then, Ryan had gotten a part-time job in the writing center at Hampshire College and also worked for a year as a writing counselor at Smith College.

He also had started to sell his own work to the sports magazines and that aspect of his professional life took shape as well, which resulted in two books published by Lyons Press, one titled "Fly Fishing for Small-Mouth Bass," the other, "Northern Pike."

He believes that the market for fishing books is more or less saturated since the movie version of Norman Maclean’s classic "The River Runs Through It," which was the watershed for interest in fishing.

This seems to be the case for Ryan as well, who says he goes fishing perhaps only 40 or 50 times a year. "Thirty years ago, I fished 300 days a year," he said.

Of this area, he declares: "It’s lousy fishing, it stinks," except perhaps for the bass fishing at Quabbin Reservoir. When he feels the urge, he travels to Martha’s Vineyard, Lake Champlain, the Thousand Islands, the Adirondacks and Canada for his fishing outings. "I like to fish with friends," he says, " it’s more about relationships."

"Hunting loses it’s appeal as you get older," he said. Also, especially in the Five College area, "people look at you like you’re a criminal if you have a gun in your hand." This anti-hunting bias combined with the lack of open land locally simply means, he explains, "I don’t feel like hunting here. It feels artificial."

For those of us completely untutored in the lure of hunting, it is rewarding to go to Ryan’s essay titled ‘Water and Stone’ in the 1998 book, "Windward Crossings, a Treasury of Original Waterfowling Tales." In that graceful piece Ryan describes both past and present circumstances of duck hunting with long-time friends on the shoreline of Lake Ontario.

Of hunting’s appeal, Ryan writes: "When you are twenty years old and immortal, the possibilities for hunting remain unbound in time, stretch in front of you like the open lake, appear infinite like the shelf-rock shoreline that wraps around the bays and covers." But, tourism and development have intruded and "landscapes change - slowly maybe, subtly, but absolutely." His final lament: "The future is clear ... the days of the shoreline hunter are about over around here."

Ryan finds that students at Hampshire have a strong interest in sports because they are young enough not to romanticize the past, yet they don’t overlook the greed that is at the heart of so much of professional sports today. In other words, Ryan says, students seem to be clear-eyed, "about what larger ways there are to think about sports."

Inevitably, the question that is posed to Ryan is who are the writers and what sports stories should command our attention, if not our respect.

The list is not short, he suggests: There’s Gay Talese’s 1966 Esquire piece on Joe DiMaggio, which set the standard for the new genre of sports writing; Grantland Rice is "really important," as is Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon, both newspaper columnists; W.C. Heinz, who looked behind the hero myth; Al Stump, whose 1961 piece on Ty Cobb is a classic; H.G. Bissinger’s "Friday Night Lights;" the patrician George Plimpton, who balanced an appreciation of sports with exquisite literary sensitivity. It was Plimpton, who once observed: "The smaller the ball, the better the writing."

Ryan also likes John Feinstein on coach Bobby Knight, New Yorker editor David Remnick writing about Mohammed Ali, and perhaps most recently, David Marannis’s book about Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered," and Laura Hillenbran on the racehorse "Seabiscuit."

And from an earlier period, Mike Lupica on Tony C.; John Updike on Ted Williams’ last game at Fenway Park, and Sports Illustrated’s William Nack on Secretariat.