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Champion Journalist Portfolio
Clarke Central High School takes the region championship​
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This story is an example of my sports game coverage experience. For this football game, I took diligent notes throughout the game in order to have a detailed and accurate coverage story. Following the game, I stayed late to interview the head coach as well as multiple players. This required a different set of interviewing skills in order to respectfully approach and question the coaches and players who had just come off the field from an emotional and demanding game.
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Calling all coaches
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Although the majority of my sports writing has appeared on the ODYSSEY website, I have also written larger stories that have appeared in print in our newsmagazine. This is one example of a story that started out as a shorter article intended to be published online, but ultimately expanded and was given a two-page spread in the magazine.
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Football team enters state playoffs
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For the first semester of my junior year I was assigned the football beat, meaning I had to write a sports brief about the team every three weeks. I had fairly limited sports writing experience, but over the course of the semester I became confident in my sports reporting skills and built good relationships with the coach and players.
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CCHS vs. Walnut Grove preview
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Another one of my football beats, this story required me to do extensive sports-related research which I had no experience in prior to this story. I utilized resources such as MaxPreps to get data about each of the competing teams that was pertinent to the article, as well as interviews with the coach and players.
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CCHS vs. Madison County varsity soccer preview​
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Building on my sports reporting skills from football season, I took on the soccer beat for the Spring semester. I wrote several game previews in order to inform readers about upcoming games and provide context such as the teams' records and results of the matchup in previous years. This beat also required me to consider both the boys and girls teams and attempt to produce relatively equal coverage.
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Studying for success
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I wrote this story about the after school studying program being implemented for football players. As the reporter covering the football team, I was intentional about not only telling the most obvious stories such as game previews, but also covering news that was less well-known, such as this studying program.
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Tennis season starts at Central
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This article about the beginning of the tennis season was the first sports story I ever wrote. I interviewed coaches and players, attended a practice, and researched tennis in order to properly cover the team. At the time, I was proud to get this story published, but looking back I can see how far I have come with my journalistic and sports writing skills.
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Tennis team losing leaders
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This article is another example of my desire to scratch below the surface when writing about a sports team. The loss of senior leaders is an important event for a team, but can easily be overlooked when one is too focused on the short-term stories.
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Equal sports representation
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In my Editor's Journal last semester, I wrote about my thoughts regarding the ODYSSEY's coverage of sports at our school. We often fall into the trap of primarily highlighting football stories, because that is the biggest sport at our school, but I have worked with the sports staff to improve representation of all sports and expand our coverage.
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