The thrill of victory! The agony of defeat! Sports have provided some of the most dramatic, heroic, and moving moments in modern memory, and many people want the chance to tell compelling and exciting sports stories. But what does it take to become an exceptional sports writer? In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the steps that can help you become a sportswriter. Following this path may not guarantee you a spot as a professional sportswriter, but it will help give you a great chance to show off your skills and get noticed in the world of professional sports.
Remember, sports writing is about more than just knowing sports. The writing is itself a form of art and entertainment, and readers have a large number of choices in picking which sportswriters to read. To that end, you need to give your readers a reason to pick you as their sportswriter of choice. In short, you need a voice.
So, where do you start when you want to be a sportswriter?
A brief step-by-step on becoming a sports writer
- Start writing now. Develop your own platform where you can write frequently and regularly. Writing is a skill that you develop with practice, so the more you write the better you will get. Ideally, you would be writing an article five times a week to give you the training and the skill to crank out quality work with regularity. You might, for example, start your own blog, or develop a social media platform. Even if you plan a career in broadcasting, you will need a strong foundation in writing in order to move forward with your career, so these skills will be applicable no matter which path you take.
- Read great writers. One of the best ways to build your own writing skills is to read great writing and to think about how those writers develop their stories, craft their sentences, and assemble a piece. Find a writer you admire and read that person’s work regularly. When you follow a great sportswriter’s work, you will start to see some of the underlying structure and how the pieces come together to become something great. You can then take what you’ve learned and apply those lessons to your own writing to improve your work. It doesn’t happen over one night, but when you read enough, pretty soon, you start writing at a completely different level.
- Start at the bottom. You won’t be writing for Sports Illustrated overnight, so you need to hone your skills by taking any sports writing gig you can get. That means that you should look for opportunities to begin covering sports for your campus newspaper, your local newspaper, a local website, or other outlet where you can have a chance to interview high school, college, and minor league athletes and coaches and practice the kinds of skills you’ll need if you want to rise up to covering the big leagues for a major national publication or broadcast or cable outlet.
- Find a great editor. Every writer benefits from having a great editor to help fashion your raw copy into something terrific. Even when your editor is tearing your work to shreds, you are learning how to be a better writer. Praise can be encouraging, but constructive criticism and specific advice about what to change and how will make your stories better and make you a better sportswriter. When you find a great editor, learn as much as you can from that person so you can develop and grow as a writer.
- Be concise. In today’s media landscape, most readers will never read more than a couple of paragraphs of an article before hopping to the next story. Learn to write shorter stories so you can make your point quickly, back it up efficiently, and finish a story before the reader gets bored. It is not easy to do it from the first time, or even from the tenth try, but soon you will learn to cover an event but always leave the audience interested in returning for more.
- Network and Market Yourself. Even the best writers won’t land a gig without getting their work noticed. Post your best pieces to Twitter and Facebook. Start a LinkedIn account and a personal website to provide a portfolio of your work. The more eyeballs you can put your writing in front of, the better off you’ll be. Make use of your connections at school, through friends and family, or professionally to meet with writers, reporters, editors, and anyone who can open a door.
How to beat a writer’s block and not betray your calling?
If you are in school and on the path to becoming a sportswriter, you may find that you have less time to write essays while you are attending games to cover for your campus paper. There is not much you can do about your future career as a sports writer if you focus solely on writing academic papers. While being useful and important for your graduation, academic papers don’t actually teach you how to write some real life stories. Open any quality blog that earns lots of money in subscriptions and paywall, read two or three articles, and you will be convinced — they are as far from standard English 101 English 201 lessons as they can be. Yes, you learn to write grammatically correct but it is it. At the same time, you need to graduate, and for this, you need to spend lots of time on academic assignments. Time, you could spend on getting closer to your dream job. If that’s the case, the academic writers from an online company like WriteMyPaperHub can help. There, you can pay someone to do papers for you, so you can free up time to attend games, interview athletes, and write the sports stories that will help you secure your future. After all, when you try to find a job, employers will look at your clips, not your English 201 midterm essay.
