Carmical Sports Media Institute students cover March Madness through USA TODAY partnership

Sixteen students in the Sports Media Certificate program at Grady College are covering NCAA Tournament action, from first-round games to the women’s Final Four in Tampa, through a new partnership with the USA TODAY Sports Network.

The partnership gives students the opportunity to work as credentialed journalists at major sports events, producing written stories and other multimedia coverage for one of the nation’s leading media outlets.

“Covering March Madness was the reassurance that I needed to know this is what I really want to do because of the atmosphere, the environment, the stories…I was just on an adrenaline rush the whole entire weekend,” said Sarah Sims, a fourth-year journalism student who covered first-round women’s basketball in Columbia, South Carolina.

The partnership launched on a test basis in January when three students worked with USA TODAY to augment coverage of the College Football Playoff national championship game in Atlanta.

“These are experiences that not a lot of people are going to have on their resumés,” said fourth-year journalism major Gunter Schroeder, who covered both the CFP national championship and the recent NCAA men’s basketball regional in Atlanta. “When you show people, ‘Hey, I’ve gotten the chance to get a couple stories in USA TODAY,’ that will be kind of an eye-opener.”

Carmical Sports Media Institute professors accompany the students – which for the first weekend of March Madness included Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Columbia, South Carolina – to provide guidance, to communicate story ideas to USA TODAY editors, and then to assign stories and do first edits on the students’ work.

“Partnerships like this apply the learning that they’re getting through our classes in a way that we cannot simulate in a class,” said Vicki Michaelis, the John Huland Carmical Chair in Sports Journalism & Society, who was USA TODAY’s lead Olympics writer before coming to UGA in 2012.

The Carmical Sports Media Institute covers the students’ travel expenses, thanks to support from the Carmical Foundation and Steve and Diane Horton.

Michaelis and Carlo Finlay, Carmical Sports Media Institute assistant director, collaborated with Rachel G. Bowers, a 2011 Grady College graduate and deputy director of sports for USA TODAY Network, to create the partnership.

“We are really passionate about facilitating hands-on experiences for the next generation of sports journalists,” Bowers said. “It’s a growing experience to be able to cover something like March Madness in person for the first time, and it’s also wildly valuable to be able to see how the pros do it in real life.”

Bowers said the USA TODAY network, which includes more than 200 properties, has several goals for the program. Among them: expanding coverage of sports most important to the network’s audience, becoming familiar with the talent pool of students before they graduate and expanding the network’s digital presence. Testing the students in the pace required while covering major events is key as well.

USA TODAY also wants to help train young reporters to tell stories beyond the score, which is a core objective in the Sports Media Certificate curriculum.

“Everyone knows the results of the game, but we want to go deeper,” Bowers said. “What’s the next thing? Is it a post-game comment? Does somebody say something buzzy and viral? What does that look like? We are always looking ahead and asking ourselves, ‘How can we add value to a user’s experience?’ We don’t want to tell them stuff they already know.”

The student experience

With the Final Four still to go, the students have written more than 70 published stories about the NCAA Tournament. The stories have covered topics ranging from the necklace South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley received from a rapper to why star guard Hailey Van Lith chose to transfer to TCU.

“The ability for these students to work with these editors and other reporters and columnists at this level is invaluable,” Michaelis said.

For the March Madness opportunity, students submitted applications detailing their experience with basketball and with covering sports events on deadline. They also went through a tryout, producing live coverage at UGA women’s and men’s basketball games that simulated what they would be doing for USA TODAY.

“It was so cool being able to take everything that we’ve learned from our classes and put it into motion,” Sims said. “I think that’s a really big deal to learn how to cover other teams, and it made me push myself outside of the box.”

Second-year journalism and sports management student Tatum Esparza covered first- and second-round women’s basketball in Baton Rouge and said that all the advance preparation gave her confidence. She recalled an interaction when Kim Mulkey, women’s basketball coach with Louisiana State University, thanked Esparza for attending a press conference as they were leaving the room.

“It just like, ‘Wow,’ and then it was also like ‘Hey, you know I’m a journalist and I can do this,’” Esparza said.

Esparza connected with a photojournalist from ESPN who gave her some advice for taking sports pictures and another reporter from USA TODAY, with whom she was able to share notes.

“It was just so reassuring to know that this is the path that I chose and I’m happy that I chose it,” Esparza said. “I love what I am doing, and what I get to do in the future especially within the sports.”

For the CFP national championship, Schroeder was assigned to identify unique story angles about Ohio State quarterback Will Howard. He researched and drafted part of the story prior to the game, then added first-hand reporting and observations.

Schroeder said working on deadline was the best part of the learning experience. The game ended at 11:08 p.m., and the first version of his final story posted at 11:11 p.m. An update that included quotes from the final press conference was published the next morning.

“Obviously, you’re doing a lot of analyzing all the time during the game to figure out what is the most important or necessary part to include in this,” he said. “And, at the end of the game, you’re needing to basically follow this player’s every move.”

The partnership could grow to include other college sports events such as baseball or softball postseason games. It might be incorporated into a Sports Media Certificate class in future semesters.

“We’re out in this community all the time covering sports events, and this broadens that philosophy that we need to go where the learning happens,” Michaelis said.

Sims is grateful for the experience. “It’s really cool to have those opportunities through the sports media program and how they make those connections and really help us succeed,” Sims said.

Michaelis, who accompanied students to the NCAA women’s regional in Birmingham last weekend, said the biggest advantage to a program like this is watching the students apply lessons learned in the classroom on a much larger scale.

She calls it “ripping off the Band-Aid,” because the students know what they need to do, but they sometimes need encouragement. For instance, once they ask that first question at a national championship media day, they have a new sense of confidence and accomplishment.

“To be able to rip off the Band-Aid in these spaces…man…I just love watching it happen,” Michaelis said.

Authors: Sarah Freeman, freemans@uga.edu; Vicki Michaelis, vickim@uga.edu