By Sean Markisic
What a wild semester year it has been covering sports at The Vanguard. Between writing professional sports and BC sports, I have had the honor to express my love and appreciation of sports through writing weekly articles.
I joined The Vanguard in the fall of 2023 as a sports writer, and it’s all thanks to my good friend Oscar Docovo. Through our sports radio show that we do at WBCR, he would talk about The Vanguard all the time and kept telling me to join. At first, I was hesitant because I thought that as a writer I would not have much to add to the newspaper. One day, Oscar showed me a few articles he had worked on and I realized then how in-depth his writing was, and it was then that I decided that I should give it a shot.
I went to The Vanguard office one day and met Kate Dempsey, not even knowing what exactly to say or ask in order to join The Vanguard. My first article was covering the Knicks and Celtics game from opening night this season. I chose that because basketball was something that I felt comfortable writing about for my first article, since it’s the sport that I’m most familiar with. For the rest of the fall semester, Oscar and I would attend men’s and women’s basketball games at the West Quad, and I would write recaps for the men’s basketball games. This was a good experience for me because it gave me the chance to cover the team for the entire semester, which is something reporters do in sports leagues. I had a ton of fun attending the games as well as covering them.
Entering the spring semester, Kate Dempsey told me that I would be sports editor for the entire semester. In just three months I went from joining The Vanguard to becoming sports editor. Becoming sports editor helped me improve my writing skills as well because I was writing weekly articles covering a variety of topics in sports.
Specifically during the semester, I covered the women’s basketball team weekly as they went on their way to win four straight CUNYAC championships. I feel like as a writer it was beneficial to me to put a lot of my focus on one team from BC because I was able to hone my writing skills as the weeks went on and the season passed by. I would also like to give a special thanks to BC women’s basketball head coach Megan Campbell, who gave me the opportunity to do an interview with her and use the content to make a profile piece about her for Women’s History Month.
I have had the opportunity to meet some great people on The Vanguard’s staff; everyone contributed great things to the newspaper and they also helped me build on my ideas to help me enhance my articles. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them. I have always been passionate about sports and The Vanguard gave me free range to explore different aspects of sports, and to most of all enjoy writing all my articles. School work can be a grind, but every week I look forward to writing articles because I know that sports is my comfort zone and I never dread writing about it regardless of the topics.
My time at The Vanguard has been a blast and I can’t believe it ended this quickly. It feels like I wrote my first article just yesterday. My biggest regret is not starting earlier than I did, but I’m proud of all the articles I have written.