Giddy

The life of a sportswriter is strange. So far I've worked long hours for little to no pay in honing my skills at the Daily Tar Heel, and I've covered sports that not many people immediately rush to look for in the paper.

I can't express enough just how frustrating it is not to have people read your work and give you constructive feedback on it. It's even more maddening to think that all the work you're doing might be for naught, since the job market for sportswriters is getting weaker by the day due to the economy.

But today, on what perhaps was the busiest sportswriting day of my career, I forgot about all that and just wrote. I started out preparing questions for my football cover story on the N.C. State/UNC rivalry and its potential impact on recruiting, but then my day took an interesting turn. The Associated Press called the UNC sports desk, looking for a writer to cover tonight's women's basketball game.

Though I had way too much to do today already (interview players for story, write story, call the UNC and Illinois women's soccer coaches for a story, write that story, then go to the library and write a political science paper), I jumped at the chance and accepted.

Now it's almost 11:30...my political science paper is still unfinished...and I'm really pleased with what I accomplished. I felt like I wrote a good cover and I successfully finished the AP story on deadline (I had to turn in a short version of my story 10 minutes after the game and then submit a finished story one hour later).

You know why? Because it's pretty damn cool to see the story you wrote in places like here. And here. Writing for the AP was awesome, and writing on its deadline gave me an adrenaline rush like nothing I'd experienced before.

Whatever doubts I might have had about sportswriting...they've disappeared. I'll gladly take a chance in the competitive field to do for a living what I did tonight.