About the Project
As an avid sports fan and someone looking to get into the sports journalism world, I wanted my project to revolve around those interests. I decided to find former BYU athletes who are currently competing in the professional leagues of their respective sports and interview them about being a professional athlete and how BYU helped prepare them for their careers.
The first and probably hardest step of this process was finding people willing to meet with me for an interview. Professional athletes in any sport have busy, sometimes hectic schedules and doesn’t always afford them a lot of time for interviews with amateur journalists.
Through information on various websites that track former BYU athletes I was able to locate many of them in different sports and I set out to contact them on their social media profiles. The two platforms I mainly used were Instagram and Twitter. All of my success in getting responses came through Instagram.
As many of these athletes are located around the country and world, I set up interviews through Zoom. I asked everyone for no more than 30 minutes as to accommodate their schedules. Of the five people who agreed to an interview, they were all generous with their time and some of the interviews exceeded 30 minutes, for which I was grateful.
From the recorded interviews I created the podcasts using Audacity to edit and SoundCloud for uploading. The five episodes are free to listen to on SoundCloud, by searching “Cougs in the Pros.”
Because I want to be a sports journalist I also wanted to showcase some of my writing ability. For this I created a website where I wrote a blog type post for each of the athletes to go along with the podcast episode. The website is cougsinthepros.wordpress.com.