A Little About How I Fell In Love With Writing

I have always had a passion for writing and storytelling but I didn’t consider it as a possible career until my sophomore year of high school. In the small town where I grew up, we had two newspapers, both of which were county-wide papers that covered over six small communities. This means there’s a lot of news to cover and there is not a large employee base. To combat this, one of the paper’s journalists came to my high school in search of writers. He came into my 10th grade Honors English and told us that if any of us wanted to write about sports we could contact him and do a trial to see if we could do it. I decided to step out of my comfort zone and apply. I was in the band so I was already going to the upcoming football game and football has always been one of my favorite sports so I figured why not try something new? Little did I know that writing that one article would put me on the path I am currently on. After that trial article, I would go on to cover the rest of the season for my high school’s varsity football team. After the season-ending, I was pretty sure that I would be doing the same thing again next year, but fate had other plans. One day during my summer break I got an email from the sports editor at the other local paper in town asking me if I wanted to come to write for her.  The decision to write for that paper is what solidified my decision to pursue journalism after high school. Here I not only got to continue covering varsity football but I added volleyball and a little bit of basketball to my portfolio. I was in love with sports and didn’t want to stop writing about them. Life does get in the way sometimes and because the paper was so small they couldn’t afford to keep me after they chose to hire a full-time sports reporter. 

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Going into my senior year, I wasn’t writing anymore but I still planned on going to college and pursuing a career in journalism. During that year I fell out of love with sports on a writing level and turned my focus to politics and entertainment as the things I wanted to cover. I felt that way until my sophomore year of college when I started watching a Netflix docuseries about Formula 1 racing. I fell in love with the sport and it completely reenergized my love of sports and sports journalism. During the spring semester of my sophomore year, I got involved with an on-campus publication, HerCampus, here I could write about whatever I was passionate about. I write about sports, entertainment, travel, and all my favorite things in the world. Even though I have continued to dabble in a variety of topics, sports have completely stolen my heart. It is an all-consuming feeling that I experience when I think about the possibility that I could spend the rest of my life writing about sports. I want nothing more in the world. As I prepare to go into my senior year I don’t know what is going to happen, but I do that sports will be there with me through it all. 

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