Writing: Print/Digital
This idea was rattling in my head for a while. I was always stunned seeing the images of retired offensive linemen and the weight they had shed.
This was me putting that idea to paper. I talked with former linemen, current linemen, coaches and those in the football world for this enterprise article in Cronkite News.
It's not often that a World Championship gold medalist is walking around on your school campus.
I decided to take advantage of the great opportunity to tell the story of Arizona State University junior Justin Robinson, who overcame a road of adversity to win two gold medals in Budapest for this article in Cronkite News.
While I have focused on the men's team at Northern Arizona University, I decided to take a look at the women's team and their ascent up the rankings.
The women had just earned a No. 1 national ranking for the first time in program school history. I interviewed athletes on the team, both veterans and newcomers, to get an understanding how they have evolved over the years in this article for Cronkite News.
For this article, I traveled from Phoenix to Flagstaff to cover the season-opening meet for the Northern Arizona University cross-country team.
I recapped the meet, interviewed athletes, and examined the big picture for the team with historical context while reporting for Cronkite News.
As part of the Cronkite Borderlands Project at Arizona State University, supported by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, I traveled to the Dominican Republic for a 10-day international reporting trip. I wrote this story on the intersection of culture and baseball on the island nation, where the sport is much more than just what we see on the field. It's a vessel for many young men to provide financially for their families.
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This is the piece of journalism I most proud of. Walking into a foreign country with no interviews set up was intimidating. But I put my boots on the ground and went out into the city, conducting 14 different interviews across the country during my time there.
This is the longest-reported story of my journalism career. I started working on this enterprise story in January 2023 and turned it in at the end of April. This was a story I wanted to do since first moving to Arizona given my connection and background with the sport of running. It is my first published article in Cronkite News.
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I interviewed eight individuals during my reporting and traveled out to Flagstaff in person. I spoke with athletes, coaches and professionals in the industry to tell the story of how this northeastern Arizona city has become the epicenter of running, and the effect of that on the local college, Northern Arizona University.
The Super Bowl is one of the most popular sporting events in the world every year. With that in mind and me living in a host city in 2023, I wanted to find an angle that wasn't being written by the thousands of journalists providing coverage of the game. I am always trying to find a niché when I write, and this is an example.
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In this article for the student newspaper, The State Press, I set out to find out how the process behind the Super Bowl field and how it is constructed. The field ended up being a point of discussion during and after the game. Using interviews with two members of the field crew and a manager from the turf farm, I gave readers a look into what it takes to build a field for the Super Bowl.
With track and field being a passion of mine, I was tasked with providing the preview for the outdoor season for The State Press. I was a former track and field athlete from seventh grade until I was a junior in college.
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In this story, I spoke with seven members on the team and the coaching staff and team to give readers an idea of what to expect from the women's and men's teams prior to the 2023 outdoor track and field season.
Sports are clearly something I care deeply about. But I may just be as passionate about pop culture. Movies, TV shows, books and video games have played a huge role in my life.
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In this piece, I used skills learned from my Sports & Culture Commentary class -- which was taught by Andscape columnist Bill Rhoden -- to write this review of HBO's series, "The Last of Us" for The State Press.
I have covered many high school football games in my career. Early season games, midseason games, end of season games, playoff games and championship games. Early afternoon and late evening games.
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This was my first ever college football game reporting experience, where I covered the ASU football team's home finale for The State Press. It was my first time being in a Pac-12 press conference room.
This story, which was my first assignment as a senior sports reporter for The State Press, is another example of me trying to build on an already existing news story with a different angle. A few months before I arrived to Arizona State University, a longtime groundskeeper, Brian Johnson, at the school had retired. It was a headline that made the local news cycle.
Instead of just reporting on the retirement, I decided to catch up with Brian to see what he had been up to since retiring and discovered he was traveling the world still doing what he loves. It was during the reporting of this story that I came up with the idea for my Super Bowl field article.
For this article that I was contracted for as a freelancer for The Press Democrat, I wrote an explainer about what to expect for the 2020-2021 school year in Sonoma County with sports as the COVID-19 pandemic was surging.
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The governing body for high school sports in California, the CIF, had released a calendar that laid out a condensed timeline for sports that academic year. I drew on my knowledge of the sport as a former athlete and used my connections in the community to explain in basic terms what was going on and the effects.
During my time as a sports journalist, I have mainly focused in on the mainstream sports, like football and basketball. In this profile for The Marin Independent Journal, I stepped out of my comfort zone and reported on a sport I had never wrote about before: downhill mountain biking.
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Ironically enough, the Museum of Cycling is located less than an hour drive from my hometown. And one of the best cyclists to ever do it, Myles Rockwell, happened to live in the same city. Rockwell and I had a lengthy conversation about how his childhood factored into his eventual success, where he taught me a tremendous amount about the sport.
In this feature story for The Olympian, I honed in on a football coach who blended his love of mathematics with football to create a grading system that he used to chart his team.
The intersection of analytics and sports is a topic I am deeply interested in, and this article allowed me to explore it in an in-depth way. The coach, Steve Schultz, and I sat down for nearly an hour in his office after practice talking about the origins of the system and the process behind it.
This was one of the first feature profile stories I wrote during my internship with The Olympian in Washington state. I decided to focus in on a freshman cross-country athlete, Emmitt Douglas, who is blind.
In my reporting, I interviewed Emmitt, his teammates and coaches to give readers a glimpse of how he competes in the sport and the impact he had on his peers. With this story, an athlete and sport that usually isn't covered was featured on the front page of the newspaper.