1. What do you miss most about sports journalism?
Actual journalism and storytelling. That means digging into a long-form narrative piece, which both of my main employers thankfully gave me more room to do than most newspapers nowadays. Or digging into a continuing news story and following the threads day after day. Going to the courthouse for documents. Calling sources. Following the money. Adding up disparate facts and figures until a coherent whole emerged. But, really, for me, narrative. Getting 100 inches to travel to northern Michigan and write about Ryan Shay, who died during the Olympic marathon trial, or 80 to write about a former high school football star's battle against heroin addiction. I miss beginnings, middles, and endings, and trying to arrange them for their greatest impact. And I miss the emails that would flood in after I nailed it.
Oh, and I'd be remiss to not mention that I also miss my friends and the newsroom and press box atmosphere. I keep in touch with many of them, some on nearly a daily basis.
2. What do you miss least?
Games and press conferences - and particularly press conferences. Don't get me wrong. There are tremendous pros to being on a major beat, whether it was covering the White Sox at home, which was kind of a training ground at The Times of Northwest Indiana between prep seasons, or Notre Dame football full-time, which I did at the South Bend Tribune and its sister publication, Irish Sports Report. It was fun, in some ways, to be that wired into the minutia of a program or organization. On the other hand, my patience was severely tried by how choreographed it could be. Someone in a post above mentioned feeling insignificant covering one of probably 5,000 high school football games going on in a given night in America. And I had plenty of moments like that, too, sitting in 35-degree weather covering an early-season prep softball game or track meet in the rain. But listening to Charlie Weis ramble on about the next opponent's special teams coach could be so much worse. Same with being one of 30 people in a room pretending to care one iota about what was going to come out of Jimmy Clausen's mouth. Obviously, a lot of the most important work doesn't occur in those settings. But you still have to be there. Some people love it. I'll put it this way: Some people also love remodeling their own kitchen. In both cases, I can understand why, but it's just not for me.
My child was not born yet while I still worked mostly late nights, and college football could be a pretty manageable schedule, so the scheduling issues never affected me as much as a lot of people here. I do look back wistfully on my 20s sometimes and wonder if I missed out on a lot of Friday and Saturday nights that I'll never get back. Then again, I also spent a lot of Friday nights in places like Boston and Chapel Hill and San Francisco, so I would say it evened out.
3. What do you do now?
I just finished law school in June after 3 1/2 years and two schools. I'm taking the bar exam next week. For the first time in my life, I think I'd rather be going to a press conference.
I also get to do a little bit of freelancing. For example, I've written several non-sports stories for my university alumni magazine. I've written about nuclear technology development, Mesopotamian archaeology, economics. You name it. And that's a lot of fun.
4. Are you happier with your new career?
Not necessarily happier, per se, but it was time to try something else, and I am happier having made the leap than I would have been had I not. There are some similarities, particularly regarding researching different threads and molding them into a consistent, coherent whole. In journalism, that means a narrative feature or a news story that makes sense of things for a general readership. In law, that means putting together a winning argument, and usually dozens of different winning arguments within a single litigation. I was fortunate enough this school year to be essentially the main person, other than my supervising professor, in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois from start to the (for us) disappointing finish. It wasn't completely unlike covering a major news story all the way through, although there is a different kind of pressure - not worse, not better, just different - when you are an interested party to the matter than when you are simply an outsider shining a light in a corner. My real job starts in September.
Oh, and whether I'm happier or not, I'm definitely healthier. We'll see how that goes when the real world starts back up in a few weeks.
