Vermont Frost Heaves
Rosalind Vara, 2010
Throughout the course of January I worked for the Vermont Frost Heaves, doing a variety of different writing assignments as needed. The Frost Heaves are a professional basketball in their third season in Vermont. Alex Wolff, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and a resident of Cornwall, Vermont established the team in 2005 and worked as the team’s General Manager and public relations liaison until this season when he began to distance himself from the team in an effort to do more work at SI. With Alex less involved the team needed someone who could write large portions of the team’s yearbook, in addition to game previews and summaries – this became my internship. I was able to complete the work from campus and communicated with my supervisor through emails and the telephone.
During the internship I wrote three different types of articles for the team’s website and yearbook. Much of the work I did was in the form of player and coach biographies for the yearbook and website. These pieces required research from a variety of online databases as well as communication with both the player and the team’s head coach. Much of the information used for the biographies was found in NCAA archives, college websites and databases like www.eurobasket.com or www.asiabasket.com – websites that contain statistics and information about players who played overseas in Europe (www.eurobasket.com), Asia (www.asiabasket.com) or South American (www.sabasket.com). The biographies were only about three hundred words each, and are posted online on the team’s website (www.vermontfrostheaves.com) and printed in their yearbooks.
I also did some other short pieces for the yearbook, including a “Where are they now?” component where I conducted research online to find where former Frost Heave players were now. I used online databases to figure out if they were playing overseas or with another professional basketball team, or like some, had retired and held other jobs.
In addition to player and coach biographies I also wrote many of the team’s game summaries. Unfortunately my own basketball schedule at Middlebury College conflicted with a few Frost Heave games, so I was unable to cover all of them. When I was assigned a game, I watched the webcast on the team’s website and in addition to taking my own notes, I utilized the live-statistics feature on the league’s website. Following the conclusion of the game I had 20-30 minutes to file the story and send an email to my supervisor, the team’s general manager, Mike Healey. Mike would then read over the piece, make editorial changes, post the summary on the team’s website and send it out to local media. The summaries were part press release, part newspaper article as they had to be appropriate for the website, and for local newspapers as well.
Finally I was also in charge of writing some game previews that were printed in game day publications available at the games and a few of which were published online. These were simple, concise articles comprised of information gathered from the opponents website.
After completing my internship I realized that the work I produced was much less important than the connections I made and the relationships I built with Alex Wolff and Mike Healey. When I graduated from high school I knew there were two possible career paths for me – journalism, whether it had to do with sports or not, and some sort of environmental profession involving field work. For the past two summers I have worked for the park service conducting field research and this fall I realized that I hadn’t done anything to increase my journalism prospects. This internship was essential in establishing connections and references in the world of journalism.
That said, the assignments, while basic, also expanded my horizons in a journalism sense. While I have written extensively for Vermont newspapers I have never written anything on such a tight deadline. It takes a different approach to cover a game and then file in 20 minutes – one that requires you write and summarize the game in your head almost before it is complete. In addition, writing player biographies also poses a certain challenge, as they must be concise, creative and informational, and only a few hundred words.
I do wish that I had been more involved with the website as Alex Wolff and I had discussed in our initial meeting. However, I also realized that because I was only going to be around for such a short portion of their season it didn’t really make sense to teach me everything. Perhaps had I been able to work with them for a longer period of time I could have been more involved with the inner workings of the system. Additionally, it was frustrating that my personal basketball schedule conflicted with many of Vermont’s games and thus I was forced to watch all the games online and was never actually able to attend them in person.
Overall, the internship was definitely a worthwhile experience, I only wish that it could have been longer and thus I could have gotten more involved. I was amazed at how much leeway Mike and Alex gave me and how much they trusted my ability to complete the articles they assigned and how understanding they were of my basketball schedule and academic commitments.
Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.