I was sent to Las Vegas for the NBA 2K23 Summer League to capture highlights for social media of the three former University of Arizona players turned 2022 NBA Draft picks, and wrote this feature to summarize their respective Summer League debuts after talking to all three of them in postgame media scrums.

I wrote this feature story after covering a game between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA 2K23 Summer League which marked the first time TyTy Washington and Jalen Williams played against each other since growing up together in the Phoenix area. Both were excited to answer my postgame questions about that experience, and several other NBA websites picked up the story based on their answers to my questions.

I drove down to Gilbert, Ariz. to talk to the younger brother and former high school coach of Jalen Williams, who completed his unlikely journey from unheralded college recruit to top NBA prospect when he was drafted 12th overall by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the 2022 NBA Draft. I was proud of how the story turned out, as it showed my ability to write a story about a subject even when I cannot get in contact with the subject directly.

This story allowed me to take months of reporting on House of Sparky and Cronkite News and summarize it into an in-depth look at the 2022 Arizona State baseball season. This piece shows my ability to use a game as a jumping-off point into a larger feature looking at the storyline of a team’s season from start to finish.

This is a straightforward preview piece looking at where the Arizona State baseball team stood heading into the 2022 Pac-12 baseball tournament, using stats, observation from past reporting and fresh firsthand quotes from coach Willie Bloomquist and several players. This story not only showed my ability to write a preview but also to translate prior beat reporting from a place that had a shorter, more informal style (House of Sparky) into one that had a longer-more in-depth format in Cronkite News.

This is the aforementioned feature on Jeter Downs and Josiah Gray, who developed into star prospects after being traded to the Dodgers from the Cincinnati Reds. I covered the Dodgers minor league affiliate Rancho Cucamonga Quakes as a credentialed reporter for DodgerBlue.com in 2019, giving me access to Downs and Gray while they played there.

This is a story I adapted for print from a video package I did on Sandra Day O’Connor (Ariz.) High School Boys Volleyball star Zach Rama, one of the top prep volleyball players in the country. I compiled this story while covering O’Connor as a beat reporter for AZPreps365.com in early 2022.

This is a feature story I did on Ca’lil Valentine, who emerged as the lead running back on the Arizona football powerhouse Chandler High School team during the first few weeks of the 2021 season after moving to Chandler from his native Alameda County, California. I wrote this while covering Chandler as a beat reporterfor AZPreps365.com in late 2021.

This is a longform profile story I did on Blaine Hipa and Nason Coleman, the star senior quarterback and tight end, respectively, on the 2021 Chandler High School Football team. I reported and wrote the story after discovering a few games into the season that Hipa and Coleman played youth football together in their native Hawaii before reuniting in Arizona for their final high school season.

While I served as managing editor of the Chimes during my junior year, I also contributed a semi-weekly sports column covering Biola Athletics called Everything Eagles, combining opinion-based analysis with detailed enterprise reporting. Click below for some examples.

This is one of many special human interest features I got to do while working at the Chimes. In this case, I was able to combine a relevant sports news angle (the San Francisco 49ers making the Super Bowl) with a fun profile on a Biola student who nannied for the 49ers nead coach at the time.

This is a fun mini-feature I did on a story I first discovered when following the main Biola Athletics social account. Because I knew the sports information director well by this point, I was able to have a fun interview with him that led to this piece, an example of how I leveraged my relationships into my reporting.

This is an enterprise story I compiled based off a tip I received from someone involved in the litigation between the Orange County school board and the district superintendent, who was also a Biola trustee at the time. I used previous reporting by the Orange County Register and framed it in the context of the superintendent’s position at Biola for a newsworthy angle.

This piece provides exclusive, detailed coverage of an on-campus reorganization of two popular community organizations that generated controversy among the student body. I interviewed several students who were impacted by the change as well as the administrator who initiated it to provide all sides of the story.