Professional Publication

I didn’t realize the magnitude of the story I was writing beforehand, but in the course of my post-interview research, I was stunned: Jack Bauerle was one of the winningest swimming coaches in collegiate swimming history and coached the U.S. Olympic squad. As he retired from UGA, I aimed to emphasize his history as a coach through a human lens.

I didn’t know what to expect in a dingy church basement for an Oglethorpe County man’s hundredth birthday party. However, as I quickly learned, a man who’s lived a hundred years certainly has a story, so I spent more than an hour being a fly on the wall at the party, listening to Neely’s oral history repeated over and over again and speaking with several family members about the event’s significance.

This was a somewhat strange story – I drove half an hour to the country and was tasked with making a story out of a vehicle I knew nothing about. However, over the course of my reporting, I learned a great deal about ambulance design and tried to incorporate the impact of the ambulance on an everyday reader.

This was a hard story for me, as all the interviews I did were over the phone, which I despise in a profile. However, the life events that Grayson Godbee experienced – a traumatic brain injury to state champion – made the story so compelling that, in some ways, it wrote itself: I just had to get out of the story’s way.

This story was short and sweet, with little reporting required beyond the synthesis of a press release shared with me. It did, however, showcase my ability to write under deadline pressure – I had the story written within an hour of the release being shared with me despite having no prior notice.