Back and Busy

I'm back at the Inquirer for a new semester, and I'm busier than ever. Once again, I'm mostly working with Gary Miles - the high school sports editor. I've done a few advances for high school playoff basketball games, and a few small features for the section as well - one a girls basketball team, one on a record-breaking track athlete, and I've been working on one involving a Christian sports league starting up in May.

In addition, John Quinn, the college sports editor, has kept me busy beyond the times I've been in the office. On Saturday, John sent me and another intern to the Wachovia Center to cover Villanova's 1985 national champion team, which was being honored at halftime. Before halftime, however, they had a reception. It was my duty to not only write about what happened at halftime, but to also interview each player in order to put together a "Where are they now" section in the paper.

Everything went smoothly. We got access to the reception, even though we weren't supposed to originally. The players saw us standing outside and invited us in. Between me and the other intern, we talked to everyone there. We're now working on collaberating to put together the spread. The end result will turn out to be a great byline. I also wrote the story for Sunday's paper about the halftime presentation and got to sit through a thrilling overtime gaime between the current Villanova team and West Virginia.

John has also had me working on capsules for the NCAA tournament. He split up teams between the staff writers, and each of us were required to find certain facts regarding each team. It took much longer than expected - I ended up with 17 pages and nearly 3000 words of statistics and analysis. The capsules should be running on Sunday when they announce who gets a bid to the NCAA tournament.