Sports Journalism club highlights events, athletes

Sports Journalism club highlights events, athletes

Written by Julia Cheunkarndee

During the Sports Journalism club’s lunchtime meeting, the whiteboard quickly becomes covered with brainstorms and scribbled plans. The group of students, gathered at their desks with their papers and laptops out, are discussing ideas for future articles—all of which will be centered around Gunn sports.

Junior Faiz Aladin founded this club his sophomore year. Initially, he’d created a website for the Gunn Sports Boosters, which is a group dedicated to supporting and raising money for the athletics program at Gunn. “But there weren’t that many people going to games,” Aladin said. “I thought I could coordinate a club that raised more interest in sports and wrote about sports so that more people would go to the games, and it would help [Sports Boosters] out.”

Now, the club has created its own website (gunnsportsjournalism.com) and publishes articles there weekly. Their latest article covers the varsity soccer games against Lynbrook; the site also includes a link to upcoming games and sports events in the area.

Aladin is proud of the club’s growth, particularly since the Sports Journalism members have been juggling both their club responsibilities and schoolwork.  

Junior Alexis Bromberg, vice president of Sports Journalism, was driven to join the club by his own passion for sports writing. He believes the club brings a unique touch to the Gunn community. “We don’t see much about sports on TBN because it’s mostly focused on other stuff,” Bromberg said. “I feel like we give publicity to the teams.”

Typically, club members choose one of the brainstormed article ideas, attend the game or event and then write the story for publication. “My favorite part about the club is definitely going out to games and writing articles, even though I can’t do it all the time,” Bromberg said. “Writing articles and seeing them come out on the website is a good feeling.”  Bromberg also noted that these experiences have helped improve his writing.

Choosing what articles to cover can be difficult. “It took a little bit of twisting here and there, like with what people found interesting and the data that people wanted to see,” Aladin said. “We started doing players’ individual scores, which is probably the hardest thing: keeping track of who’s scoring like every second of the game. That takes time.”

A normal club day consists of a debrief on the upcoming games that week, and then articles are planned out and taken by different members. Currently, Aladin is planning on creating new profiles on different athletes, consisting of details on how they train and manage their diets.

“I used to read the newspaper a lot, like the sports section, and it was really fun to read,” Aladin said. “I always think of that when I read our articles. Overall, writing is something that people don’t do that much these days. And it’s been fun to keep that going.”