Media Participation Project: Kyle Melnick

On Sunday, October 26, I covered the Maryland wrestling inter-squad scrimmage for The Diamondback. The Diamondback sports editor, Aaron Kasinitz, gave me this assignment.

I went to the Xfinity Center Pavilion in order to report the event. I sat on my computer throughout the event, and live-tweeted results and news from the wrestling matches. For each match, I tweeted who was competing, and then who won each match, also updating the total scores for each team. I got in contact with a man who works for the Maryland Athletic Department, and told him who I would like to interview after the event. I told him I wanted to interview the head coach and two wrestlers on the team. Throughout the matches, I wrote down questions to ask the players and coaches that would help me receive information and help me gain leads for my article recapping the event.

After the coach finished the post-game meeting, I interviewed the players and coaches, asking them questions while recording their answers on audio. Aaron let me know I had a strict two-hour deadline for my story after the event, and that I must write a 600 word recap of the event. Thus, after the event, I sat down and gathered my thoughts from the event and the interviews, and created an angle for my recap.

I created an angle on how the wrestling team is re-grouping and moving on without their star wrestler from last season, Jimmy Sheptock. I listened to the quotes the players and coaches gave me, and I incorporated them in my story in order to reinforce my angle. It was stressful to finish the article within the given time limit, but I finished right at the deadline, and E-mailed it to Kasinitz.

Once I sent it to Kasinitz, he told me to come in to the Diamondback office in order to read over my work and discuss it, as this was the first article I wrote for the Diamondback. He gave me advice, as I didn’t reinforce all of my points back to the angle of losing Sheptock, so he told me that I should work on that in the future. We discussed strategies to make interesting and good leads to articles, and how I could improve on that in future articles as well. After we discussed my article, he sent it to the editors, and the next day, Monday, October 27, my article made the back page of The Diamondback.

Covering this wrestling event for the Diamondback was a great experience for me. It was the first sporting event that I covered while in college, and the first sporting event that I live-tweeted. I learned a lot about creating questions for players and coaches, how to write an interesting and informational article, how to report sporting events, and overall I learned a lot about the process and stress of meeting deadlines. I will be covering the Women’s Tennis beat for The Diamondback in the spring, so this was a good experience for me in order to learn how to report and write good recaps on sporting events. I look forward to carrying this experience and the lessons I learned with me as I write more articles for The Diamondback in the future.