For the love of sports

Tonight The Prairie had a mixer with the local community college where we not only got to mingle with each other and give the visiting students a chance to experience WT but the editor of the local major paper in the area, the Amarillo Globe, also came to talk to us.

One of the things he said was that as journalists, our goal should be to make a change in the community where we work. He gave some real life examples that make total sense and while I’m not really planning on doing anything outside of sports, I related to what he said and even saw how it could apply to my area of the industry.

I’m not sure if I’m going to be a journalist in the “real” sense or if I’m going to go into media relations but like making a difference in the community, I want to make a different for whatever sport I work in. My immediate plans are obviously to work with the USEF and my goal there isn’t just to grow the association within the equestrian community, but also to educate those outside of the industry about this part of the Olympic team.

Sports as a whole are huge in cultures all over the world but at least in America, not many people focus on our national teams. And with hundreds of professional teams playing year-round on television, I understand how our country’s teams can get lost in the shuffle. But I also believe that with the right kind of attention given to these teams, they can gain more popularity and fans. The ways to reach this goal may change throughout my career but working for one of the US National Teams has been one of my goals for quite a while now and I think that this is one goal that I will always focus on.

I know my goal is a huge undertaking but if I can get more people to focus on national teams during my career, I will feel like I have accomplished something. So yes, the speech we got may have applied to local communities and non-sports news but like a ton of stuff I have learned during my school career, information that doesn’t directly apply to my field can always give me ideas for my own field.