There haven’t been many constants in my life so far, but my love for and almost reliance on sports has been one of the most consistent things that I have come to know. Growing up in a huge, Catholic family of seven children was destined to be a place where athletics thrived; although we never quite had enough kids for even teams. I had an interesting introduction to sports; when I was about one-year old, my parents moved my whole family from our home of Akron, Ohio to Manchester, Vermont, where we lived for six years while my family owned our own popcorn business. In Vermont I was exposed to many extreme sports such as skiing, snowboarding, and snowmobiling, while still being immersed in the New England and Boston team culture that many Northeasterners are faithful to. When we returned to Akron in 2003, it was one-year shy of LeBron James and his National Championship team, and the city was buzzing; in fact, since he was now playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers, all of Northeast Ohio was buzzing. My mom enrolled my sister, who was an incoming sophomore, at Saint Vincent-Saint Mary High School, where LeBron had gone, and my other siblings and me at a local Catholic elementary school. Tragedy struck my family in 2006 when my dad suddenly passed away from a heart attack, that was caused by silent myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that went undetected for many years. My dad was our coach, in the literal sense; he coached almost all of our sports teams, videotaped all of our second grade Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) games to show to us afterward, and instilled a set of principles in us from a young age. He was also a life coach of sorts, as parents usually are.
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Work hard; that’s what he taught us. Don’t complain; that’s what he made sure that we knew from the time we were young. He had a love for sports so great that he passed it on to all of his children, and when he was gone, it seemed that the only place I could find some level ground and consistency in my life was through sports. Since my sister and brother went there, I found an immediate love for STVM sports, as well as a figure I looked up to in LeBron. In fact, I would give him almost all the credit for why I wanted to get into sports journalism from the time I was in third-grade; I wanted to write about LeBron, and what he was doing, and I did. I wrote a family newspaper, the highly-acclaimed and prestigious Dulaney Times and juggled the positions of editor, staff writer, photographer, and columnist. Most people say that they didn’t know what they really wanted to do in their life, career wise, until they were maybe a junior in college, but I knew when I was nine. The world of professional sports fascinated me, I looked up to athletes, as many young kids do, but I did it in a different way. I loved their stories; I admired so much how many of them came from underprivileged backgrounds, single-parent households, or were motivated by adversity, hardship, and misfortune and came out better for it in the end. I could personally relate to many of them, as I used not just organized sports, but also running to forget about things in my life that I was going through. I wrote about myself in a journal I’ve been keeping for more than 10 years, and I wanted to write about them. I was so thankful for athletes who wrote books, or journalists who told about them, that I wanted to do the same. I wanted to someday write a feature story about an athlete who had lost a loved one or had gone through a really hard time, and came out using that loss to fuel their immense success. So although it is that I have a definite passion for sports, it is more than that. The events in my life and how they have played out so far have driven me to find solace and an unchanging nature within sports, but they have inspired me to want to be a journalist, and tell their stories. While reading this book many characters stood out to me; there were a fair share of journalists and those who worked in public relations, but there
Work hard; that’s what he taught us. Don’t complain; that’s what he made sure that we knew from the time we were young. He had a love for sports so great that he passed it on to all of his children, and when he was gone, it seemed that the only place I could find some level ground and consistency in my life was through sports. Since my sister and brother went there, I found an immediate love for STVM sports, as well as a figure I looked up to in LeBron. In fact, I would give him almost all the credit for why I wanted to get into sports journalism from the time I was in third-grade; I wanted to write about LeBron, and what he was doing, and I did. I wrote a family newspaper, the highly-acclaimed and prestigious Dulaney Times and juggled the positions of editor, staff writer, photographer, and columnist. Most people say that they didn’t know what they really wanted to do in their life, career wise, until they were maybe a junior in college, but I knew when I was nine. The world of professional sports fascinated me, I looked up to athletes, as many young kids do, but I did it in a different way. I loved their stories; I admired so much how many of them came from underprivileged backgrounds, single-parent households, or were motivated by adversity, hardship, and misfortune and came out better for it in the end. I could personally relate to many of them, as I used not just organized sports, but also running to forget about things in my life that I was going through. I wrote about myself in a journal I’ve been keeping for more than 10 years, and I wanted to write about them. I was so thankful for athletes who wrote books, or journalists who told about them, that I wanted to do the same. I wanted to someday write a feature story about an athlete who had lost a loved one or had gone through a really hard time, and came out using that loss to fuel their immense success. So although it is that I have a definite passion for sports, it is more than that. The events in my life and how they have played out so far have driven me to find solace and an unchanging nature within sports, but they have inspired me to want to be a journalist, and tell their stories. While reading this book many characters stood out to me; there were a fair share of journalists and those who worked in public relations, but there