A Look Back at My Brief Time as Sports Editor of The Vision.

Updated: Sep 13, 2023

The main academic building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, provided by Wiki Commons.

I graduated from Hernando High School in Hernando, MS, of Desoto County in May 2020. I was 44th in my class of nearly 300 students despite working long hours at a local Chick-fil-A most nights, and covering basketball games for Audacy's Grind SZN podcast host Anthony Sain's blog site, blu3worldorder.com. That site has unfortunately been long archived due to inactivity. The reins were handed to me, leading me to become the lead editor, but life had different plans.

My full time job became an overtime job, I still had to finish high school, and get ready for college. Writing about basketball became difficult. I was young in learning time management. Since then, I have had a wealth of opportunities, met amazing people across a variety of companies and fields, and gained incredible experience. Anthony Sain gave me my first opportunity, and I appreciate him for all the help and mentorship he has given me in the years since. He's had an impact on so many people across Memphis, TN, and has made an example of making the most of any opportunity.

Thanks to the confidence and writing experience I gained writing with Sain as a 16-year-old junior in high school, I found myself as a sports editor of a school newspaper, The Vision. It should be mentioned that this was not just any school. I had the fortune of being accepted into the Mississippi School for Math and Science in Columbus, MS. MSMS gives the best description of themselves on their About page: "Mississippi's only public, residential high school specifically designed to meet the needs of the magnolia state’s most academically gifted and talented students with an emphasis in STEM education."

I was only there for a few months before the opportunity to cover the Memphis Grizzlies and the Memphis Hustle as credentialed media arose. In that short time, I gained some journalism and column-writing experience with full support from the staff sponsor, Thomas Richardson. Recently, Richardson released a collection of poetry, How to Read: Poems, that has earned him a nomination for Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. Check out more details here from Friendly City Books, a Columbus, MS, local book store.

Richardson, a sports writing fan himself, truly allowed me to break out of a shell and allow myself to write about sports news as a whole through my own lens as a young high schooler. I had the opportunity to write long form columns about scandals surrounding NCAA rule changes before the age of the NIL, the start of the fall of Urban Meyer, and Colin Kaepernick trying to use his platform for good. Part of this brought a great source of support for a young writer. My favorite would be a comment from Woody Paige, legendary sports columnist based in Denver and regular contributor to ESPN's Around the Horn:

I look back to this brief experience as a cornerstone to my current perspective on what an opportunity can mean. If there is a lesson learned because of it, that is growth. If it does not go to plan, was the original plan the right one? If so, learn from the mistakes. If not, learn how to plan for the circumstances that could be ahead. As sports editor of The Vision, I learned that it does not matter where you are, there are avenues that can be built to practice and grow skills. I will be extremely grateful of this little extracurricular for years to come.