Most people who know me are aware of my intense love for the San Francisco Giants. My undying loyalty to the Giants isn’t due to a deep family history in the bay area or some romantic tale, however. Instead, my family got a new cable subscription in 2011 and we accidentally got the NBC Sports Bay Area channel. Similar to how the Giants randomly fell into my heart, my path to becoming sports editor for SUU News is also a story of happenstance and possible fate.
In high school, I was a visual arts major at Las Vegas Academy of the Arts, and we had literally no sports teams. Seriously, the only thing we had that was close to sports was the weekly Quidditch game the Harry Potter club would play.
Despite having no experience with athletics and all the experience with how to wash various types of paint out of my hair, when I graduated from high school I was set on becoming a general manager for a Major League Baseball team. I don’t know why this is the career I was set on achieving, but I knew I loved baseball and I knew I wasn’t about to get into a Parisian art school, so I enrolled in the business program at SUU.
I quickly realized that a business degree required a lot of math, something I am terrible with, and I had a crisis. I had no idea what I wanted to be and couldn’t keep changing my major while figuring it out. After an hour-long conversation with my mom and lots of stress tears, I decided to just switch to a communication degree. It can be applied to pretty much anything, and I could earn a few minors along the way if I wanted to.
When registering for my sophomore year I tried to go back to getting into sports by registering for a baseball coaching and officiating class, but it was canceled due to lack of interest. For fun, I registered for a gallery and museum practices class because I had previously enjoyed hanging my shows in high school. I fell in love with the idea of being a museum curator and added museum studies and art history minors to my degree. It seemed like my visual arts roots would win out after all.
In the midst of preparing for a future surrounded by aging art, I wrote an opinion piece about Jill Stein spray-painting a bulldozer blade at Standing Rock for my news practicum class. To my surprise, the operations manager of the Journal at the time offered me a job writing and taking photos for the newspaper. Despite my befuddlement at the offer, I accepted and started learning AP Style and news writing techniques. Just a few weeks into learning how to be a reporter, I somehow ended up taking a volleyball story. Albeit my utter lack of knowledge about volleyball, I actually enjoyed working with my professor, Hayden Coombs, on the article, so I continued to pick up the occasional sports story. To my surprise, I really enjoyed learning and writing about the athletics on campus.
Starting to become rather conflicted, I signed up for the certificate in sports communication with the encouragement of Coombs. After being Art Chief my second semester at the Journal I decided to go with sports. Thankfully Coombs, now the operations manager, gave me the opportunity to be sports editor.
I definitely know I have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to my sports knowledge. My friends take me to the bar on Sundays for “football lessons” and my boyfriend assigns me homework in the form of Madden. I still know more about the intricacies of impressionism than I do football routes, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this is the world I want to be immersed in for the rest of my life. I’m having fun adding my own voice to sports media, and I hope you’ll have as much fun reading my section.
Story By
Haleigh Clemens
sports@suunews.com
