I would say that this Newsday was the hardest one for me to decide on because it took me quite a while to think of a story. Taylor organised a press conference with two food nutritionists in sport with Meghan Bailey and Debbie Smith who specialised in helping athletes with their diets. As this is really not an area of expertise for me, I had to think long and hard to find a story, but I finally decided on looking into how important a good diet can be when you’re trying to make it to the next stage as an athlete if you’re just below professional.
The approach I decided to take was looking for what they said in the press conference about this sort of thing and then decided to look for an athlete who has made it but is still young to tell me how important he believes his diet is if he wants to advance in his career. I also wanted to explore how skills are not the only thing you need if you want to make it. They of course are important but discipline and nutrition are also huge factors.
I divided up the work by making sure i got good quotes from the press conference and then organising an interview with enough time spare to think of how I was going to type it all up.
The athlete I chose to ask was Harry Sayers, who has just been taking a year abroad in Germany to play American football professionally. As a university student who is looking very likely to make it to the big leagues, he gets advice from his team and also when he was in Germany about his diet. This was a good person as he isn’t fully in professional American football, but then he has played at high levels and is looking to make it to that place. The press conference also of course gave me a lot of information as they said a lot of things about people they’ve worked with.
I thought the idea was quite a good idea for a story as i believe that it is a good read for anybody who is trying to make it far in any sport. It informs you that you can’t just be skilled, you need more than that and it is literally backed up by professionals who are more than qualified to give advice on the matter.
What went wrong was that when I actually came to writing my story, I was struggling to find what to write to take it over the word count in my first draft. Due to it only just being over three hundred on the first draft, there wasn’t that much I could actually get rid of.
What could have gone better is that I think maybe if I am being honest, I could have done some more research on the two professionals after seeing them, like reading more of their articles than I did.