New Writer

I an a student in high school and am interested in writing sports. What is the best way to start off a career? I am currently starting a site containing a blog. I made a twitter for it and also applied for one of the jobs i found on here. I don't have enough money to establish a domain. I am also posting NBA power rankings weakly along with baseball preseason stuff.

 

Seems like an epidemic around here lately.

 

I'd try to strengthen your NBA rankings first thing.

 

I might regret asking, but I have a question. How do you have a blog but no domain? Does your ISP provide that for you?

A domain is not that expensive.

 

I started out just getting to know and follow closely Oklahoma HS sports on a state-wide message board (Yes, CoachesAid). When CoachesAid started charging, I made a free message board that became extremely popular and because I was pretty well known by players and coaches around the state, despite also being a high school student at the time, I got an offer to join the team at the local Rivals.com site.

I declined initially because I wanted to learn more about journalism first. I knew I was going to study journalism, but wasn't sure if I'd choose Kansas or Arkansas for school. Eventually, I chose Arkansas, got really into the school paper and as a freshman was traveling with the soccer team doing color commentary on the radio. After getting my feet wet in the world of "actual" journalism, I took the Rivals gig and have been covering recruiting throughout my 4.5 years in college.

I eventually transferred to Colorado State, continued working with Rivals and became the SE for my school paper, was nominated for the Runyon Scholarship and got a couple of Mark of Excellence Awards for sports column writing by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Since graduation, I've interviewed with various newspapers and ESPN for both editorial and reporter spots and feel like a couple will offer within the next week. And how did it all start?

Because of posting on a sports message board as a junior in high school.

There's no clear cut way to start your career, just try to find your niche as early as possible (no rush, just the sooner you do, the easier things become). For me it's recruiting and film analysis, for you it may be the NBA.

Also at least try things out in TV and radio. In college, our campus TV station wanted to have me on as a guest analyst quite a bit, but even if I might have been good on camera, TV just isn't my cup of tea. I love writing. Plus, there is that whole thing where I tend to mumble ...

 

see if your local paper has any opportunities to help out or freelance. Maybe you and your high school can work out some credit so they don't have to pay you. i know at my old shop we used to get high school students to help us keep stats at football games.

 

Make sure this is what you want to do. Sportswriting is changing, and it'll be a tougher life for the sportswriter. If you want to try it, go right ahead. But, understand what the job is really like. You don't have many off-hours, newspapers will probably die off, and garbage collectors will likely have a better pay than you will. Good luck however you go.

 

Learn your multimedia skills. These days, even if your job title is as a writer or reporter, you'll be asked to shoot video for your employer's website, and should be comfortable doing quick video takes after games or major news. By all means, develop your writing, but you need more than that today.

 

Learn how to write. Don't worry about blogging and tweeting until you have some authority to tweet about something.

 

And that takes years, as most of us know. Then, once you think you have that down, you need to continue learning and become smarter.

 

The OP is the American Sports Source. That means he/she is already an f***ing stud.

 

To be more clear, anybody can post NBA power rankings and opinions about preseason baseball on a blog. Journalism requires doing the actual work of reporting, which means going to get new information from sources. A blog with opinions about what you watch on TV is not journalism. Instead, build a relationship with your high school sports teams and write about them for your school newspaper, or even a blog about them. If you want to succeed in journalism, you have to report, not opine.