My Work

I write about sports, mainly basketball and soccer, on a freelance basis for the New York Times, NBA.com, SLAM Magazine (as a senior writer), and a few other publications. I cover professional games, interview players, and file anything ranging from a 2,000 word feature profile to a game story on deadline.

Kenyon connection to the job:

During my freshman and sophomore years, I covered the Kenyon football team for the campus newspaper (The Collegian). It was amazing to walk up to The Collegian booth at the student fair and just sign up to cover the football team as a freshman. That just can't happen at a big school. My editor at The Collegian, Jay Helmer '04, was very helpful in allowing me to begin the process of finding my voice. My Collegian work helped me land a Cleveland Cavaliers correspondent gig with SLAM, as my sophomore year at Kenyon coincided with LeBron James's rookie season and my mentor at SLAM, Ryan Jones, had written LeBron's high school biography.

Key Kenyon experiences:

Any Spanish class with Clara Román-Odio, my advisor, had an effect on me. She challenged me to bring a unique point of view to class on a consistent basis. Since I was a Spanish major and studied abroad in Madrid, I like to think of the three months I later spent based out of Madrid during the 2011 NBA lockout as a sports-writing graduate school of sorts. I covered European soccer and basketball and got to focus on my Spanish again.

"Writing about sports for the student newspaper, I began the process of finding my voice."

Kenyon skills that help me in my work:

The space to learn another language, to think and write critically in a nurturing environment, and to grow up, is all I could have asked for from an undergraduate institution. I definitely got all of that from Kenyon.

Loving the job:

No matter how hard I push myself—and I've worked extremely hard at this—there's a level of enjoyment to writing about exciting games and sensational athletes that can't be beat. I'm writing this sentence on an Acela train right now, en route to an assignment, as Delaware flies by out the window.

Job high point so far:

It's pretty impossible to pick one. Courtside at LeBron's Playoff debut surrounded by 20,000 screaming Clevelanders in black 'Witness' tee shirts; watching a small Spanish soccer club remain in first place for the only time in its 102-year existence; watching the sunlight beam in to the oldest Division-I college basketball gym in America. They all just blend together into an alphabet soup that reads: you are extremely lucky.

Outside the job:

I work on screenplays, TV pilots, and short stories. I'm very much a work in progress as far as those mediums are concerned—and Hollywood is a needle-in-a-haystack industry—but I find writing fiction enjoyable and well worth my spare time.