Norm Wood is a sports journalist at The Daily Press, a newspaper based out of Hampton, VA. After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1998, Wood moved back to his hometown of Newport News and covered high school sports for two years. Wood started on the Virginia Tech football beat in 2000 and currently lives with with his wife and twin daughters in Suffolk, VA.
Let’s start at the beginning, what’s the backstory of Norm Wood?
I grew up in Newport News. I spent the first 18 years of my life there. Went to the University of Georgia for five years, then came right back to Newport News. I was lucky enough, at the time in 1998, to get a full time job at The Daily Press. Met my wife there within a year-and-a-half of getting there, that kind of kept me around Newport News. I live in Suffolk now, which is like 15 minutes from Newport News. Born and raised there, got settled down there, and that’s kind of where we put down the roots.
Living in Suffolk and working in Newport News, does that mean you travel and stay in hotels, or do you have a house in each place?
The way it works out is I own a house back in Suffolk. That’s where I pay the mortgage. Fortunately — I wouldn't do this setup if I had to pay for my own place out here — I’ve been fortunate that the newspaper pays for the odd four-month lease down here for apartments and townhouses, furnished places. We’re pretty unique in that. We were the first ones to move out here and do full-time coverage back in 2001. I just live out here during the fall, August to December.
Does your family come with you when you are in Blacksburg?
No, my wife’s a lawyer. Her practice is back in Norfolk and Portsmouth, so she can’t move all of that out here. And we’ve got four year old twin girls, so it would be hard to move everything out here just for four months. It’s only four months. If it was longer, I’d be divorced.
Was there a point in your life that you knew being a sports journalist was the profession for you?
Well I had an idea, when I was in high school, that it was something that I was really interested in. I always liked to write. I did well in classes involving writing, English classes, government — which involved a lot of writing— various history classes and things like that. I also had this crazy notion that I sort of hung onto — when you’re 4-or-5-years old, you have an interest in animals — I wanted to be a veterinarian. I kind of kept that all the way through high school. I went to Georgia because it had a great vet program, like Virginia Tech does. Virginia Tech was high on my list, also, it was probably second on the list. I went to Georgia because they had a great vet school plus they had a great journalism program. Obviously you have a good journalism program here in the communications department. I got maybe a year into my education career at Georgia as a pre-vet major, and then I ran into an advanced calculus class. It was the only one I was ever going to have to take. It was enough for me to realize that I was basically math illiterate when it came to higher math. I was the stereotypical writer from that standpoint. I basically shifted gears from that point and went to journalism. That’s probably still to this day, it’s probably one of my bigger regrets, just because I feel like I let calculus beat me. It beats a lot of people, I know, but it bothers me. Having said that, I’m happy I made the choice that I did. It’s worked out for the best.
Were there any extracurricular activities that you participated in while in high school that went along with journalism?
I was the sports editor for the student newspaper, which at the time, our student paper came out quarterly. We only had four or five a year, unless you had a special edition. We didn't have many, but since I was the sports editor, I’d fill it up with two or three stories. It was a pamphlet, more-or-less. We’d actually have to take it to a printer to have it printed. That’s sort of the dark ages of the early 90’s. But other than that, I ran cross country. I was all-conference and all-state honorable mention as a senior. I played baseball for four years, started three years, made all-conference my senior year. I played football up through my junior varsity years and then switched gears. I tried basketball and track and all of that. Technically, I guess you could say I played those, but I was horrible.
What was your experience like in Athens when you decided to go to Georgia?
For me, I wanted a departure from what I had in high school — which at the time, the school that I went to was 6th-thru-12th grades — we had 420-some students. My graduating class was 62, which I know for a lot of places in southwest Virginia and central Virginia, that’s not a lot uncommon to have a smaller school. But where I’m from, that’s a tiny, tiny graduating class. I wanted the big school experience, which I didn't have in high school. As soon as I visited Georgia, I fell in love with Sanford Stadium. You get to walk on a bridge that’s sort of elevated over the stadium on one of the end zone sides. You see down into that giant bowl, it’s 96,000 fans, that was a big selling point for me, as a big football-head at the time. Once I realized, yeah, they’ve got really good courses of study and disciplines in the two areas I was interested in, I thought this was the place for me.
How did you get involved with the student newspaper, The Red & Black, once you got to Georgia?
I kind of floated around my first year. Like I said, I was totally onboard with the vet-med thing, so I didn't get involved at The Red & Black until my sophomore year, which was the fall of ’94. I started out as a cross country writer, just because I had done a lot of that in high school. I kind of understood it and understood the athletes and the coaching a little bit. So I got involved with that, I did that for two-and-a-half years. It was really, really, really rewarding to me. It was the education that I needed for this (profession.) I always tell people that I learned just as much at The Red & Black as I did in my journalism classes. It’s such a unique course of study. I had a couple of journalism professors that understood what I was interested in, who let me, at the time, fax in my homework assignments. They understood what I was doing with The Red & Black. It was a time when newspapers were still kind of booming and thriving, kind of the tail-end of that. I did that for two-and-a-half years. I covered everything. I covered women’s basketball, gymnastics, football for a couple of years, sports editor for three quarters — they were on the quarter system instead of semesters — cross country, I did some Olympic coverage because the Olympics were in Atlanta in ’96. I parlayed that to a year-and-a-half of part time — I call it part time-full time, because they worked me full time but paid me part time — at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I guess I could have done both, the work with Red & Black and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, but it would have taken every second that I had. I dropped Red & Black at that point and spent the last year-and-a-half working for the AJC in the sports department.
Did you ever get chance to do any radio or tv while at Georgia?
No, I didn’t. That’s a good question, because it’s surprising to me when I look back at it now. We were all so specialized back then. Broadcast people were broadcast people, radio folks were radio folks, print guys were print guys. That’s just the way it was. We didn’t cross-pollinate much at the time. But now, I know you get an education and a base of knowledge across a broad range of things, which is awesome, I think. It’s so cool. I would have loved to have had that experience across different platforms. It was so specialized when i was there, I wrote for the student paper and beyond editing — I didn't even have to copy edit — that was all I had to do. As I look back at it now, it probably would have been far more valuable to me to get some experience across different platforms, just because of the way the job has evolved. Now it involves so many different things.
Going off of that, how do you think social media has changed the profession?
Social media has become a job unto itself. You see some of these places that hire reporters just to do social media. It’s changed the nature of — well it’s really changed everything. It’s changed the job itself, it’s also changed the nature of the access you get in this job. One of the biggest reasons we don't get as much access anymore on a daily basis is because of social media, because everything is so instantaneous. Sports information departments and coaches can't moderate or police it. So the way they police it is to eliminate the opportunities in the first place. It’s negatively changed in that way, as far as access. To me, it’s great that we can have an instant avenue for breaking news. For the consumer, it’s incredible to be able to read news as it happens. I often think about — I know Facebook was a thing, I don't even know if Twitter had been invented — April 16, 2007. I wasn’t here that morning, I came out that night. I had been here a few days earlier, probably for spring football, I’m guessing. But I’ve thought back about that a lot. I’ve thought, “Man, how much different would that experience have been from a journalism standpoint if Twitter existed?” I don't think it existed, but if it did, hardly anybody was on it. [Twitter was founded in 2006] I think about what it would have been like. How much would that have changed the nature of how it was reported? It’s opened up a lot of avenues for breaking news, like I said, and to get the consumer more involved, for sure.
I was going to save this for later, but since you brought it up, we’ll go ahead and talk about it now. You were here on April 16, 2007. What was that like?
Like you would imagine, it was chaotic. So much of the chaos was created by media. We’re all trying to get stories and I get it. Virginia Tech, to their credit, did a very nice job of corralling us all at The Inn over there off the golf course. That was sort of headquarters for everybody from The Daily Press to CNN. When I use the term chaos, I use that purely as a media description. Students were as professional and calm and unbelievably receptive, for the most part, to the fact that thousands of strangers were crawling all over their campus, as I could have ever imagined. They were amazing. Listen, I can say a lot of things about how a fan base frustrates me for the way they react to certain stories that I post or other colleagues post — social media, we can all get frustrated over Facebook posts and certainly Twitter mentions and whatever — but that day, in particular, just the way students and people that are fans on Saturdays reacted, it was amazing. There were so many amazing stories. Everybody seemed to be willing to tell them. I think, for a large number of those kids, it was a cathartic thing. I wouldn't dare put media or mention media in the same breath as their mothers and fathers, but I think it was the opportunity for them to sort of have an outlet to talk about some things when mom and dad weren’t there, ya know? Again, it doesn’t compare to what mom and dad can provide when you need them, but I think for some of those kids to tell their stories, as open and heartfelt as they were, I think that it served a small portion of that role. It was hard. I can readily say (that) I got choked up in some scenarios. Walking outside Norris Hall on the sidewalk closest to the Drillfield, there’s a thing now, if you go there, there’s the rock garden (monument). Across from Burruss (Hall), with Norris to the right if you’re facing it, I remember walking out that night and the next morning and seeing that area which is now the rock garden and then you cross the road there and you come to a sidewalk outside Burruss and Norris. Outside Norris, for the longest time, and I remember seeing for a few years after that, there were blood stains on the sidewalk. It made it into a story of mine. That was a pretty powerful image to see. I remember seeing where that came from, the kids being carried out of (Norris) and dragged across that sidewalk into the relative safety of the grassy area there on the Drillfield. It had a lasting effect on me. The next year after that, I was very fortunate to win an Associated Press Sports Editor’s National Award for a story I wrote on Frank Beamer and his experience with it a year later, talking with families and students that were effected, and how hard it hit him. This is his home and alma mater…the place he worked so successfully for so long. It was a powerful experience for me, and still is.
What do you remember of the first football game after the tragedy against East Carolina?
If I remember correctly, it was 19-9. [17-7 was the final] I knew 2007 would come up at some point in our conversation so I thought I better look up that first game. I remember it was a strange game. It was unlike any home opener Tech had ever had. Never mind the fact that it had happened four or five months earlier, it was just the fact that people were so solemn coming into what’s usually a giant party on a Saturday. I think it took people a little while to get into the spirit of things. Having said that, I remember some defensive stands in that game where it was as loud as I’ve ever heard it in Lane Stadium. Clemson, Miami, West Virginia, all of those games on a Thursday night, I think that rivaled any of those times. To go from this very solemn, almost sort of feeling-out process at the start of the game by fans and even players, maybe that’s why they played so timid. It was very, very odd in the stands, I’m sure. You could sense that from the media standpoint. Fans didn't know who to react at first. But once Tech — they obviously built their foundation under Frank and Bud (Foster) on defense and special teams for so long — once they got back in that mode, fans realized this is a Saturday and it’s a football game. They played a role, they started playing their role again. Like I said, it was rocking in there.
There’s no easy transition from that, so we’ll just make an awkward one. You covered high school sports for The Daily Press for a few years, how was that experience?
I think back about it and I think of it as some of the most fun that I’ve had in this job. High school sports is a big deal anywhere, but there, being that it was my hometown and I’d grown up watching so many of these high schools and knowing a lot of these kids that went to high schools there — I grew up watching Allen Iverson at Bethel High School, and Ronald Curry at Hampton High School, and Michael Vick, I saw a little bit of — but to be able to cover and be immersed in all of that was pretty awesome. Now having said that, I don't know if I’ve worked any harder than I have during those two years that I covered high schools. It’s basically 50 high schools I was covering and they all want coverage, and probably all warrant coverage. Everybody’s got stories, especially the high school kids. That’s the coolest thing, they’re so open and if you tap into something their into, or have a story that they really want to tell, it’s so much fun. It was fun because I got to create that part of the section. Basically, with a lot of editors, they know that they need to devote a lot of the section to high schools, but I think they leave a lot of the actual construction of it to the reporter and try to not make it formulaic. I got to be as creative during that two year stretch as I’ve ever been. I had a blast. I had a ton of fun doing that. I miss it sometimes. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Super Bowl or if it’s the 100m final in the summer Olympics, or if it’s Tech-Ohio State on a Monday night, or if it’s the biggest game on a map-dot town, that’s your Super Bowl. Everybody treats it that way. That makes it fun. It’s difficult to relate a southwest Virginia football game to Newport News because they are larger schools and larger communities, but also — this is a totally different topic — because there are so many kids at those schools and because the communities are so much larger, it’s so much more noticeable when the stadiums are half-filled, which they are so frequently these days. That is frustrating. (In southwest Virginia) it’s the show. It’s life. I got that experience when I worked part-time for the AJC, I covered bigger high schools as a general rule, so Gwinnett County high schools on Friday nights. Because I was part-time, I got to ‘strain’ for some other newspapers in smaller communities so I would sometimes cover games out in the ‘sticks’ on Friday night where there would be 5,000 or 10,000 people. You’d wonder where they all came from. It’s cool. It’s a blast.
You’ve been covering Virginia Tech on the beat for 17 seasons, just how much has this place changed?
It’s changed a lot, I mean it goes without saying. You just look at the stadium, if you put a picture of the stadium in 2000 next to a picture today, it’s almost unrecognizable. Never mind the facade is completely different and beautiful. One of the end zones is closed now when it wasn’t in 2000. They have the luxury suites now that they didn't in 2000. I think just what Jim Weaver started, as far as the uniformity of the athletic buildings falling more in line with the Hokie Stone motif throughout campus, was cool. It just looks first-class. I’ve watched this program go from Big East, which was a huge step for them to having success in the Big East — and playing in the year after their national championship game appearance, when it looked a couple times like they would have the change to go back — and then in 2007, the Matt Ryan Boston College game. That game, if they would have won that game, they would have continued to be in the national title conversation. I’ve seen it all. All the way to rock bottom, for them, the four year stretch with Frank to end his career. Rock bottom for Virginia Tech and rock bottom for other programs are totally different things. It’s hard to go through a four year stretch when you’re a little over .500 when you’ve won 10 or more games for eight straight seasons. Going from the coaching staff that was maybe, collectively, the longest tenured staff in the country — Penn St. also at the time with Joe Paterno — to what seemed like annual changes for a six or seven year stretch as far as assistants are concerned. And now we are in the Fuente era, it’s been an interesting 17 seasons. Never any shortage of storylines, for sure. Again, I’ve been really fortunate to live out here during the fall and not have to travel. I did that in 2000, I travel back-and-forth two or three days a week in a 1986 Volvo 240-GL, which was on it’s last legs and actually died the spring after that. I think that pretty much wore it out. It’s been fun.
Do you have any memorable moments that stand out in your career?
In 1999, I got to go to Cuba for nine days. Which now, it’s not as cool now that they’ve opened the gates to go visit if you can find a way to get there. You can get there. But back then, at the time, we had a local high school, Hampton Christian High School, which was about to become the first American high school in 40 years — since the revolution — to play baseball on Cuban soil. They went down there for a nine-day tour and we got down there on a religious visa. Which actually was more difficult to obtain than a tourist visa, because tourist visa were always issued to Europeans or South Americans. They don't care if those folks come in. A religious visa raised a few more eyebrows, because along with the religious visa, we also came with a lot of boxes of relief and things they thought were interested in. Which they were, they took half of our stuff that we were gonna give to the people. So I was just along for the ride with this religious visa, but it gave me an avenue to a place that I might never see again. I knew at the time, obviously, I thought, “I will never be back in this place again.” Here I am, I think I was 24, I was there for nine days and we stayed in Havana for most of it. We traveled out into some of the countryside to play some games. It was so unique because there was no social media and I didn’t have a cell phone. I wasn’t taking video. I had a notepad, a micro-cassette voice recorder, and a disposable camera to take some pictures of my own, which I had never had to do before for my own story. The pictures turned out pretty well. It was basically, “Go here for 9 days, don’t write a single word, don’t call, don't do a radio interview about your trip while you’re there. Just gather a bunch of stuff, come back and write a 100-inch story when you get back.” Which is just bizarre, to think about now, that you’re not writing every second of every day you’re there, taking your laptop to fields and keeping your battery charged on your laptop so you can write in the middle of an open field and hope to find a hotspot. It was fun. It was a blast to be able to go. When I think back about my experience with ‘old-time’ journalism, that’s it. I got to go to a place that people had’t, Americans hadn’t been able to go to openly in 40 years, and then gather for one huge overarching theme to write about over the course of 100 inches. That was by far the most unique, and probably the most fun I’ve ever had reporting a story. Olympic coverage in ’96 was fascinating. I got to do volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics and stuff like that. I can honestly say I will never see it again live — I don't really want too — or cover it again. Chasing around Michael Vick and his family in downtown Newport News, which became to be a rough place the time I was down there around midnight, the night he decided to turn pro, and then breaking that story nationally. That was probably my biggest story that I broke, especially up to that point, for sure. And then April 16, 2007. It was not only the fact that I was here that night and the next day gathering stories that were really meaningful and meant a lot to me, too, it was just the fact that I was stretching myself as a news reporter, too, which I had never really done. That’s a 31 year old dude doing that, experiencing something new like that at the time, even though it was under such horrible circumstances, was really an interesting challenge for me.
Your roots are pretty well planted, so do you see yourself staying at The Daily Press?
Yeah. People have asked me before like, “Didn’t you want to go anywhere else? Ya know, work for other news organizations?” Well, yeah. At certain points in my life, in college for the longest time, I had at the top of my resume, (my) career objective was to be a columnist at a major metropolitan newspaper. Which I think was standard operating procedure for anybody who was applying for a sports journalist job in the print injury. That was rubber stamped at the top of your resume, that’s what you wanted to do. Columnist, beat reporter, feature reporter, whatever the big-time position that was open at a major metropolitan newspaper, that was just what you wanted to do. It was different for me, because like I said, I was really lucky when I came out of college. I thought for a while I was either gonna go for work in Valdosta, GA, with 45,000 circulation daily, or in Montgomery, AL where I knew some people and may have had an in there. But along came this opportunity at the Daily Press which was at first a part-time job for six months that became a full-time job. They said, “Come on in, (we’ll) see what you can do. We’ve got a position for you, but it’s a part-time job. We’ll give it to you in August and check back after the new year and see where we’re at.” I busted my tail for four months. I worked 16-18 hours a day just doing anything I could help around the office. Tried to cover things that had nothing to do with high school. Up Saturday mornings to cover road races or boat races or whatever. Just doing anything I could. Covering anything from the biggest AAA schools we had to private schools. Even though I had some help, I was trying to help my help on staff. Our staff was about 13 people in the sports department back then, now it’s five full time writers. So much of that is — nobody’s been laid off at our paper in the sports department — people have left to take other jobs and we never filled the position again. I became both the UVA and Virginia Tech beat writer, which is what I do now (for basketball). I’ve done that for football until this season. We’ve started a content sharing thing with the Virginia Pilot. Just this fall alone, we’re taking their UVA football coverage and they’re taking my Tech football coverage and then I’ll go back to covering both schools for basketball season. But since 2008, I’ve covered both, and that’s just a construct of modern-day newspapers. It’s been different for me because I met my wife at the paper. I met her in January of 2000, she was in college at the time, we dated for six years and that kept me around. And then my mom lives 20 minutes away from me and that was important for me to be relatively close to her. My sister is close, she’s 20 minutes the other direction. To me, frankly — it’s just my own personal preference and something that keeps me happy — I like being near the water. If I moved anywhere else, I’d wanna move somewhere near the water. I’m already there. I like being near the beach. I grew up on the beach and grew up surfing and going to the beach every day, or as much as I possibly could anyways. I’m just lucky to be where I’m at. I like my job. I like the newspaper I’m at. I’m proud to work there. I don’t care that it’s not the Boston Globe — which was my dream at one point — or back at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, or the Dallas Morning News, or even larger papers in our chain — the Tronc chain — the LA Times, Baltimore, Chicago, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, all of that. I don’t even care that it’s not the largest paper in the state. It’s a place that makes me happy and I think we do really good work.
We are starting to wind down a little bit. With that said, do you have any advice for students who want to head into your field?
It’s not groundbreaking stuff — this goes back to what we talked about where I said it was so specialized when I started — but do as much as you possibly can across all areas across all platforms. Get your name as visible as you possibly can. I know how hard it is to get your name out there when you’re 20 or 21 years old, but in your little world, the Virginia Tech/ACC realm, make your name as visible as you possibly can. Post on message boards, put your links up there, put some SoundCloud links on your Twitter so they know what your voice sounds like, just every single opportunity that you can, take it seriously. Blogs now-a-days have become the avenue for people — which for me was laughable even five years ago, ten years ago it wasn’t even a suggestion that you could make a blog a full time job — 10 to 15 years from now, that may be the full-time job for sports reports other than the people you see on tv. So much of blogs are about ‘hot-takes’ and the opinion of the moment type thing. Which is fine, that’s not what I was trained in, but that’s the way it’s going these days, especially in our field. Visibility, I think, and experience across so many different platforms is critical. You don't know what kind of job you’re gonna get hired for when you get out of here. You don't know if it’s gonna be print or tv or radio or someone in the dot-com realm like working for a blog. Do it all and don’t — I mean seriously, do not worry about bills — don’t worry about what you’re getting paid to do (in college). It’s not a reflection of what you’re gonna get paid when you’re out there. You may not, chances are you’re not gonna make a lot of money when you get out there in your first gig, but it’s gonna be a lot more than whatever you’re making freelancing or stringing for whoever you work for in college. Just do that, whatever that thing is. Get that clip, get that SoundCloud audio, get those audio clips, get the video. It’s like they say with the actual athletes, ‘Put something down on film.’ Put something down on print, put something down on audio, and put something down on video. Ask if these sites or newspapers or tv stations or radio stations need help. Ask. All they can say is no. Who cares? It’s not embarrassing. Move on to the next one. This is where I get into the woods with it a little bit because I was so lucky. My story is not common. Even back then, when I was coming out of college in 1998, I had a couple jobs that just weren't appealing to me — the Valdosta or the Montgomery jobs — but they were there. I worked part-time in the summer of 1995 and busted my tail at the Daily Press as a freelancer, but it was just something I did when I was at home that summer. I lived at the Daily Press that summer. It was the paper I read growing up and I thought, ‘I’m getting more into this journalism thing, I’ll see if they need some help.’ They did. They wanted someone to cover Norfolk Tides games that summer to fill in for the regular Tides beat writer when he was off. And the boat races I told you about, the road races, powerboat races, just whatever, it was just a potpourri of stuff. That made a difference. Years later, they didn’t have an opening, but I said I was interested in coming back and working for (The Daily Press) if I could and like a month later they said they had a part-time opening and asked if I’d like to take it under the assumption that after the New Year, I’d be relied to see where I was at. Of course there was more opportunity back then to shake a little money loose to create a position, which is totally different than the experience kids have now-a-days coming out of college. That happened for me. But again, it was more about asking. Just ask. I put my resume out to 12 other places, half of which I never even heard back. Appleton, WI, Detroit, MI, a couple places in Texas, a place in Colorado, some states I hadn’t even visited before, Florida and some larger places, too. In a lot of ways, it was right place, right time.
I grew up in Newport News. I spent the first 18 years of my life there. Went to the University of Georgia for five years, then came right back to Newport News. I was lucky enough, at the time in 1998, to get a full time job at The Daily Press. Met my wife there within a year-and-a-half of getting there, that kind of kept me around Newport News. I live in Suffolk now, which is like 15 minutes from Newport News. Born and raised there, got settled down there, and that’s kind of where we put down the roots.
Living in Suffolk and working in Newport News, does that mean you travel and stay in hotels, or do you have a house in each place?
The way it works out is I own a house back in Suffolk. That’s where I pay the mortgage. Fortunately — I wouldn't do this setup if I had to pay for my own place out here — I’ve been fortunate that the newspaper pays for the odd four-month lease down here for apartments and townhouses, furnished places. We’re pretty unique in that. We were the first ones to move out here and do full-time coverage back in 2001. I just live out here during the fall, August to December.
Does your family come with you when you are in Blacksburg?
No, my wife’s a lawyer. Her practice is back in Norfolk and Portsmouth, so she can’t move all of that out here. And we’ve got four year old twin girls, so it would be hard to move everything out here just for four months. It’s only four months. If it was longer, I’d be divorced.
Was there a point in your life that you knew being a sports journalist was the profession for you?
Well I had an idea, when I was in high school, that it was something that I was really interested in. I always liked to write. I did well in classes involving writing, English classes, government — which involved a lot of writing— various history classes and things like that. I also had this crazy notion that I sort of hung onto — when you’re 4-or-5-years old, you have an interest in animals — I wanted to be a veterinarian. I kind of kept that all the way through high school. I went to Georgia because it had a great vet program, like Virginia Tech does. Virginia Tech was high on my list, also, it was probably second on the list. I went to Georgia because they had a great vet school plus they had a great journalism program. Obviously you have a good journalism program here in the communications department. I got maybe a year into my education career at Georgia as a pre-vet major, and then I ran into an advanced calculus class. It was the only one I was ever going to have to take. It was enough for me to realize that I was basically math illiterate when it came to higher math. I was the stereotypical writer from that standpoint. I basically shifted gears from that point and went to journalism. That’s probably still to this day, it’s probably one of my bigger regrets, just because I feel like I let calculus beat me. It beats a lot of people, I know, but it bothers me. Having said that, I’m happy I made the choice that I did. It’s worked out for the best.
Were there any extracurricular activities that you participated in while in high school that went along with journalism?
I was the sports editor for the student newspaper, which at the time, our student paper came out quarterly. We only had four or five a year, unless you had a special edition. We didn't have many, but since I was the sports editor, I’d fill it up with two or three stories. It was a pamphlet, more-or-less. We’d actually have to take it to a printer to have it printed. That’s sort of the dark ages of the early 90’s. But other than that, I ran cross country. I was all-conference and all-state honorable mention as a senior. I played baseball for four years, started three years, made all-conference my senior year. I played football up through my junior varsity years and then switched gears. I tried basketball and track and all of that. Technically, I guess you could say I played those, but I was horrible.
What was your experience like in Athens when you decided to go to Georgia?
For me, I wanted a departure from what I had in high school — which at the time, the school that I went to was 6th-thru-12th grades — we had 420-some students. My graduating class was 62, which I know for a lot of places in southwest Virginia and central Virginia, that’s not a lot uncommon to have a smaller school. But where I’m from, that’s a tiny, tiny graduating class. I wanted the big school experience, which I didn't have in high school. As soon as I visited Georgia, I fell in love with Sanford Stadium. You get to walk on a bridge that’s sort of elevated over the stadium on one of the end zone sides. You see down into that giant bowl, it’s 96,000 fans, that was a big selling point for me, as a big football-head at the time. Once I realized, yeah, they’ve got really good courses of study and disciplines in the two areas I was interested in, I thought this was the place for me.
How did you get involved with the student newspaper, The Red & Black, once you got to Georgia?
I kind of floated around my first year. Like I said, I was totally onboard with the vet-med thing, so I didn't get involved at The Red & Black until my sophomore year, which was the fall of ’94. I started out as a cross country writer, just because I had done a lot of that in high school. I kind of understood it and understood the athletes and the coaching a little bit. So I got involved with that, I did that for two-and-a-half years. It was really, really, really rewarding to me. It was the education that I needed for this (profession.) I always tell people that I learned just as much at The Red & Black as I did in my journalism classes. It’s such a unique course of study. I had a couple of journalism professors that understood what I was interested in, who let me, at the time, fax in my homework assignments. They understood what I was doing with The Red & Black. It was a time when newspapers were still kind of booming and thriving, kind of the tail-end of that. I did that for two-and-a-half years. I covered everything. I covered women’s basketball, gymnastics, football for a couple of years, sports editor for three quarters — they were on the quarter system instead of semesters — cross country, I did some Olympic coverage because the Olympics were in Atlanta in ’96. I parlayed that to a year-and-a-half of part time — I call it part time-full time, because they worked me full time but paid me part time — at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I guess I could have done both, the work with Red & Black and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, but it would have taken every second that I had. I dropped Red & Black at that point and spent the last year-and-a-half working for the AJC in the sports department.
Did you ever get chance to do any radio or tv while at Georgia?
No, I didn’t. That’s a good question, because it’s surprising to me when I look back at it now. We were all so specialized back then. Broadcast people were broadcast people, radio folks were radio folks, print guys were print guys. That’s just the way it was. We didn’t cross-pollinate much at the time. But now, I know you get an education and a base of knowledge across a broad range of things, which is awesome, I think. It’s so cool. I would have loved to have had that experience across different platforms. It was so specialized when i was there, I wrote for the student paper and beyond editing — I didn't even have to copy edit — that was all I had to do. As I look back at it now, it probably would have been far more valuable to me to get some experience across different platforms, just because of the way the job has evolved. Now it involves so many different things.
Going off of that, how do you think social media has changed the profession?
Social media has become a job unto itself. You see some of these places that hire reporters just to do social media. It’s changed the nature of — well it’s really changed everything. It’s changed the job itself, it’s also changed the nature of the access you get in this job. One of the biggest reasons we don't get as much access anymore on a daily basis is because of social media, because everything is so instantaneous. Sports information departments and coaches can't moderate or police it. So the way they police it is to eliminate the opportunities in the first place. It’s negatively changed in that way, as far as access. To me, it’s great that we can have an instant avenue for breaking news. For the consumer, it’s incredible to be able to read news as it happens. I often think about — I know Facebook was a thing, I don't even know if Twitter had been invented — April 16, 2007. I wasn’t here that morning, I came out that night. I had been here a few days earlier, probably for spring football, I’m guessing. But I’ve thought back about that a lot. I’ve thought, “Man, how much different would that experience have been from a journalism standpoint if Twitter existed?” I don't think it existed, but if it did, hardly anybody was on it. [Twitter was founded in 2006] I think about what it would have been like. How much would that have changed the nature of how it was reported? It’s opened up a lot of avenues for breaking news, like I said, and to get the consumer more involved, for sure.
I was going to save this for later, but since you brought it up, we’ll go ahead and talk about it now. You were here on April 16, 2007. What was that like?
Like you would imagine, it was chaotic. So much of the chaos was created by media. We’re all trying to get stories and I get it. Virginia Tech, to their credit, did a very nice job of corralling us all at The Inn over there off the golf course. That was sort of headquarters for everybody from The Daily Press to CNN. When I use the term chaos, I use that purely as a media description. Students were as professional and calm and unbelievably receptive, for the most part, to the fact that thousands of strangers were crawling all over their campus, as I could have ever imagined. They were amazing. Listen, I can say a lot of things about how a fan base frustrates me for the way they react to certain stories that I post or other colleagues post — social media, we can all get frustrated over Facebook posts and certainly Twitter mentions and whatever — but that day, in particular, just the way students and people that are fans on Saturdays reacted, it was amazing. There were so many amazing stories. Everybody seemed to be willing to tell them. I think, for a large number of those kids, it was a cathartic thing. I wouldn't dare put media or mention media in the same breath as their mothers and fathers, but I think it was the opportunity for them to sort of have an outlet to talk about some things when mom and dad weren’t there, ya know? Again, it doesn’t compare to what mom and dad can provide when you need them, but I think for some of those kids to tell their stories, as open and heartfelt as they were, I think that it served a small portion of that role. It was hard. I can readily say (that) I got choked up in some scenarios. Walking outside Norris Hall on the sidewalk closest to the Drillfield, there’s a thing now, if you go there, there’s the rock garden (monument). Across from Burruss (Hall), with Norris to the right if you’re facing it, I remember walking out that night and the next morning and seeing that area which is now the rock garden and then you cross the road there and you come to a sidewalk outside Burruss and Norris. Outside Norris, for the longest time, and I remember seeing for a few years after that, there were blood stains on the sidewalk. It made it into a story of mine. That was a pretty powerful image to see. I remember seeing where that came from, the kids being carried out of (Norris) and dragged across that sidewalk into the relative safety of the grassy area there on the Drillfield. It had a lasting effect on me. The next year after that, I was very fortunate to win an Associated Press Sports Editor’s National Award for a story I wrote on Frank Beamer and his experience with it a year later, talking with families and students that were effected, and how hard it hit him. This is his home and alma mater…the place he worked so successfully for so long. It was a powerful experience for me, and still is.
What do you remember of the first football game after the tragedy against East Carolina?
If I remember correctly, it was 19-9. [17-7 was the final] I knew 2007 would come up at some point in our conversation so I thought I better look up that first game. I remember it was a strange game. It was unlike any home opener Tech had ever had. Never mind the fact that it had happened four or five months earlier, it was just the fact that people were so solemn coming into what’s usually a giant party on a Saturday. I think it took people a little while to get into the spirit of things. Having said that, I remember some defensive stands in that game where it was as loud as I’ve ever heard it in Lane Stadium. Clemson, Miami, West Virginia, all of those games on a Thursday night, I think that rivaled any of those times. To go from this very solemn, almost sort of feeling-out process at the start of the game by fans and even players, maybe that’s why they played so timid. It was very, very odd in the stands, I’m sure. You could sense that from the media standpoint. Fans didn't know who to react at first. But once Tech — they obviously built their foundation under Frank and Bud (Foster) on defense and special teams for so long — once they got back in that mode, fans realized this is a Saturday and it’s a football game. They played a role, they started playing their role again. Like I said, it was rocking in there.
There’s no easy transition from that, so we’ll just make an awkward one. You covered high school sports for The Daily Press for a few years, how was that experience?
I think back about it and I think of it as some of the most fun that I’ve had in this job. High school sports is a big deal anywhere, but there, being that it was my hometown and I’d grown up watching so many of these high schools and knowing a lot of these kids that went to high schools there — I grew up watching Allen Iverson at Bethel High School, and Ronald Curry at Hampton High School, and Michael Vick, I saw a little bit of — but to be able to cover and be immersed in all of that was pretty awesome. Now having said that, I don't know if I’ve worked any harder than I have during those two years that I covered high schools. It’s basically 50 high schools I was covering and they all want coverage, and probably all warrant coverage. Everybody’s got stories, especially the high school kids. That’s the coolest thing, they’re so open and if you tap into something their into, or have a story that they really want to tell, it’s so much fun. It was fun because I got to create that part of the section. Basically, with a lot of editors, they know that they need to devote a lot of the section to high schools, but I think they leave a lot of the actual construction of it to the reporter and try to not make it formulaic. I got to be as creative during that two year stretch as I’ve ever been. I had a blast. I had a ton of fun doing that. I miss it sometimes. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Super Bowl or if it’s the 100m final in the summer Olympics, or if it’s Tech-Ohio State on a Monday night, or if it’s the biggest game on a map-dot town, that’s your Super Bowl. Everybody treats it that way. That makes it fun. It’s difficult to relate a southwest Virginia football game to Newport News because they are larger schools and larger communities, but also — this is a totally different topic — because there are so many kids at those schools and because the communities are so much larger, it’s so much more noticeable when the stadiums are half-filled, which they are so frequently these days. That is frustrating. (In southwest Virginia) it’s the show. It’s life. I got that experience when I worked part-time for the AJC, I covered bigger high schools as a general rule, so Gwinnett County high schools on Friday nights. Because I was part-time, I got to ‘strain’ for some other newspapers in smaller communities so I would sometimes cover games out in the ‘sticks’ on Friday night where there would be 5,000 or 10,000 people. You’d wonder where they all came from. It’s cool. It’s a blast.
You’ve been covering Virginia Tech on the beat for 17 seasons, just how much has this place changed?
It’s changed a lot, I mean it goes without saying. You just look at the stadium, if you put a picture of the stadium in 2000 next to a picture today, it’s almost unrecognizable. Never mind the facade is completely different and beautiful. One of the end zones is closed now when it wasn’t in 2000. They have the luxury suites now that they didn't in 2000. I think just what Jim Weaver started, as far as the uniformity of the athletic buildings falling more in line with the Hokie Stone motif throughout campus, was cool. It just looks first-class. I’ve watched this program go from Big East, which was a huge step for them to having success in the Big East — and playing in the year after their national championship game appearance, when it looked a couple times like they would have the change to go back — and then in 2007, the Matt Ryan Boston College game. That game, if they would have won that game, they would have continued to be in the national title conversation. I’ve seen it all. All the way to rock bottom, for them, the four year stretch with Frank to end his career. Rock bottom for Virginia Tech and rock bottom for other programs are totally different things. It’s hard to go through a four year stretch when you’re a little over .500 when you’ve won 10 or more games for eight straight seasons. Going from the coaching staff that was maybe, collectively, the longest tenured staff in the country — Penn St. also at the time with Joe Paterno — to what seemed like annual changes for a six or seven year stretch as far as assistants are concerned. And now we are in the Fuente era, it’s been an interesting 17 seasons. Never any shortage of storylines, for sure. Again, I’ve been really fortunate to live out here during the fall and not have to travel. I did that in 2000, I travel back-and-forth two or three days a week in a 1986 Volvo 240-GL, which was on it’s last legs and actually died the spring after that. I think that pretty much wore it out. It’s been fun.
Do you have any memorable moments that stand out in your career?
In 1999, I got to go to Cuba for nine days. Which now, it’s not as cool now that they’ve opened the gates to go visit if you can find a way to get there. You can get there. But back then, at the time, we had a local high school, Hampton Christian High School, which was about to become the first American high school in 40 years — since the revolution — to play baseball on Cuban soil. They went down there for a nine-day tour and we got down there on a religious visa. Which actually was more difficult to obtain than a tourist visa, because tourist visa were always issued to Europeans or South Americans. They don't care if those folks come in. A religious visa raised a few more eyebrows, because along with the religious visa, we also came with a lot of boxes of relief and things they thought were interested in. Which they were, they took half of our stuff that we were gonna give to the people. So I was just along for the ride with this religious visa, but it gave me an avenue to a place that I might never see again. I knew at the time, obviously, I thought, “I will never be back in this place again.” Here I am, I think I was 24, I was there for nine days and we stayed in Havana for most of it. We traveled out into some of the countryside to play some games. It was so unique because there was no social media and I didn’t have a cell phone. I wasn’t taking video. I had a notepad, a micro-cassette voice recorder, and a disposable camera to take some pictures of my own, which I had never had to do before for my own story. The pictures turned out pretty well. It was basically, “Go here for 9 days, don’t write a single word, don’t call, don't do a radio interview about your trip while you’re there. Just gather a bunch of stuff, come back and write a 100-inch story when you get back.” Which is just bizarre, to think about now, that you’re not writing every second of every day you’re there, taking your laptop to fields and keeping your battery charged on your laptop so you can write in the middle of an open field and hope to find a hotspot. It was fun. It was a blast to be able to go. When I think back about my experience with ‘old-time’ journalism, that’s it. I got to go to a place that people had’t, Americans hadn’t been able to go to openly in 40 years, and then gather for one huge overarching theme to write about over the course of 100 inches. That was by far the most unique, and probably the most fun I’ve ever had reporting a story. Olympic coverage in ’96 was fascinating. I got to do volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics and stuff like that. I can honestly say I will never see it again live — I don't really want too — or cover it again. Chasing around Michael Vick and his family in downtown Newport News, which became to be a rough place the time I was down there around midnight, the night he decided to turn pro, and then breaking that story nationally. That was probably my biggest story that I broke, especially up to that point, for sure. And then April 16, 2007. It was not only the fact that I was here that night and the next day gathering stories that were really meaningful and meant a lot to me, too, it was just the fact that I was stretching myself as a news reporter, too, which I had never really done. That’s a 31 year old dude doing that, experiencing something new like that at the time, even though it was under such horrible circumstances, was really an interesting challenge for me.
Your roots are pretty well planted, so do you see yourself staying at The Daily Press?
Yeah. People have asked me before like, “Didn’t you want to go anywhere else? Ya know, work for other news organizations?” Well, yeah. At certain points in my life, in college for the longest time, I had at the top of my resume, (my) career objective was to be a columnist at a major metropolitan newspaper. Which I think was standard operating procedure for anybody who was applying for a sports journalist job in the print injury. That was rubber stamped at the top of your resume, that’s what you wanted to do. Columnist, beat reporter, feature reporter, whatever the big-time position that was open at a major metropolitan newspaper, that was just what you wanted to do. It was different for me, because like I said, I was really lucky when I came out of college. I thought for a while I was either gonna go for work in Valdosta, GA, with 45,000 circulation daily, or in Montgomery, AL where I knew some people and may have had an in there. But along came this opportunity at the Daily Press which was at first a part-time job for six months that became a full-time job. They said, “Come on in, (we’ll) see what you can do. We’ve got a position for you, but it’s a part-time job. We’ll give it to you in August and check back after the new year and see where we’re at.” I busted my tail for four months. I worked 16-18 hours a day just doing anything I could help around the office. Tried to cover things that had nothing to do with high school. Up Saturday mornings to cover road races or boat races or whatever. Just doing anything I could. Covering anything from the biggest AAA schools we had to private schools. Even though I had some help, I was trying to help my help on staff. Our staff was about 13 people in the sports department back then, now it’s five full time writers. So much of that is — nobody’s been laid off at our paper in the sports department — people have left to take other jobs and we never filled the position again. I became both the UVA and Virginia Tech beat writer, which is what I do now (for basketball). I’ve done that for football until this season. We’ve started a content sharing thing with the Virginia Pilot. Just this fall alone, we’re taking their UVA football coverage and they’re taking my Tech football coverage and then I’ll go back to covering both schools for basketball season. But since 2008, I’ve covered both, and that’s just a construct of modern-day newspapers. It’s been different for me because I met my wife at the paper. I met her in January of 2000, she was in college at the time, we dated for six years and that kept me around. And then my mom lives 20 minutes away from me and that was important for me to be relatively close to her. My sister is close, she’s 20 minutes the other direction. To me, frankly — it’s just my own personal preference and something that keeps me happy — I like being near the water. If I moved anywhere else, I’d wanna move somewhere near the water. I’m already there. I like being near the beach. I grew up on the beach and grew up surfing and going to the beach every day, or as much as I possibly could anyways. I’m just lucky to be where I’m at. I like my job. I like the newspaper I’m at. I’m proud to work there. I don’t care that it’s not the Boston Globe — which was my dream at one point — or back at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, or the Dallas Morning News, or even larger papers in our chain — the Tronc chain — the LA Times, Baltimore, Chicago, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, all of that. I don’t even care that it’s not the largest paper in the state. It’s a place that makes me happy and I think we do really good work.
We are starting to wind down a little bit. With that said, do you have any advice for students who want to head into your field?
It’s not groundbreaking stuff — this goes back to what we talked about where I said it was so specialized when I started — but do as much as you possibly can across all areas across all platforms. Get your name as visible as you possibly can. I know how hard it is to get your name out there when you’re 20 or 21 years old, but in your little world, the Virginia Tech/ACC realm, make your name as visible as you possibly can. Post on message boards, put your links up there, put some SoundCloud links on your Twitter so they know what your voice sounds like, just every single opportunity that you can, take it seriously. Blogs now-a-days have become the avenue for people — which for me was laughable even five years ago, ten years ago it wasn’t even a suggestion that you could make a blog a full time job — 10 to 15 years from now, that may be the full-time job for sports reports other than the people you see on tv. So much of blogs are about ‘hot-takes’ and the opinion of the moment type thing. Which is fine, that’s not what I was trained in, but that’s the way it’s going these days, especially in our field. Visibility, I think, and experience across so many different platforms is critical. You don't know what kind of job you’re gonna get hired for when you get out of here. You don't know if it’s gonna be print or tv or radio or someone in the dot-com realm like working for a blog. Do it all and don’t — I mean seriously, do not worry about bills — don’t worry about what you’re getting paid to do (in college). It’s not a reflection of what you’re gonna get paid when you’re out there. You may not, chances are you’re not gonna make a lot of money when you get out there in your first gig, but it’s gonna be a lot more than whatever you’re making freelancing or stringing for whoever you work for in college. Just do that, whatever that thing is. Get that clip, get that SoundCloud audio, get those audio clips, get the video. It’s like they say with the actual athletes, ‘Put something down on film.’ Put something down on print, put something down on audio, and put something down on video. Ask if these sites or newspapers or tv stations or radio stations need help. Ask. All they can say is no. Who cares? It’s not embarrassing. Move on to the next one. This is where I get into the woods with it a little bit because I was so lucky. My story is not common. Even back then, when I was coming out of college in 1998, I had a couple jobs that just weren't appealing to me — the Valdosta or the Montgomery jobs — but they were there. I worked part-time in the summer of 1995 and busted my tail at the Daily Press as a freelancer, but it was just something I did when I was at home that summer. I lived at the Daily Press that summer. It was the paper I read growing up and I thought, ‘I’m getting more into this journalism thing, I’ll see if they need some help.’ They did. They wanted someone to cover Norfolk Tides games that summer to fill in for the regular Tides beat writer when he was off. And the boat races I told you about, the road races, powerboat races, just whatever, it was just a potpourri of stuff. That made a difference. Years later, they didn’t have an opening, but I said I was interested in coming back and working for (The Daily Press) if I could and like a month later they said they had a part-time opening and asked if I’d like to take it under the assumption that after the New Year, I’d be relied to see where I was at. Of course there was more opportunity back then to shake a little money loose to create a position, which is totally different than the experience kids have now-a-days coming out of college. That happened for me. But again, it was more about asking. Just ask. I put my resume out to 12 other places, half of which I never even heard back. Appleton, WI, Detroit, MI, a couple places in Texas, a place in Colorado, some states I hadn’t even visited before, Florida and some larger places, too. In a lot of ways, it was right place, right time.
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