Stories of a First Time Sports Journalist

Let me start off by saying that I in no way have any experience in writing about any kind of sport. Normally I cover news that happens on campus and write the occasional opinion column, so when I was asked to go along with some of the other writers to cover the Mountain West Basketball Tournament, I was surprised; after hearing more about it I decided to tag along and see what I could do to help.

Seeing that I am not a sports writer and know as much about sports writing as any stereotypical white girl might, I was asked to just cover social media for the game, which I thought would be fairly simple. All I had to do was update the Statesman Twitter and Snapchat accounts with the score, right? Wrong.

First off, let me point out that basketball is a fast game and normally by the time I posted the score on Twitter it had changed at least twice. Second, sports fans want a lot more detail than a person might think, which usually had me scrambling to find out the name of the players on the teams (which is a lot harder if you only watched two basketball games before this tournament) and what the heck the name of the shot they just made was.

As for covering the game on Snapchat…well, let me take this time to formally apologize to all 300 people who actually went through all of the blurry pictures and terrible sound quality videos of the band and spirit squad. I’m still learning and hopefully things started to look better toward the end of the tournament.

Despite all of my complaining, though, I had a blast at the tournament. Being a sports journalist had more perks than I thought. I got a free trip to Vegas with all expenses paid throughout the entire tournament. Also having the ability to go almost anywhere in the stadium was pretty awesome.

However, I think the best part of the tournament (and yes I know how sappy this is going to sound but I’m going to write it anyway) is working with the people I met. As a news journalist the only people you usually meet are the ones you interview and even then it’s only for as long as the interview takes and then you’re gone — everything else is done online. As a sports journalist you work as a team and get to know everyone there from the players to the bus driver (by the way, you’re awesome, Ernie). You see the teams’ frustration as well as their excitement on the court and then see that reflected tenfold in the fans, reporters, security, cheer teams, band, and yes, even the bus driver.

The culture and overall emotion of the game is amazing and watching it play out from every possible perspective is amazing to watch, and although I’m not planning on switching over to writing sports any time soon I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in this world.

— shaniehoward214@gmail.com