The first thing that stands out to me when I think about the start of my college experience is the Philadelphia Flyers. Believe me, I wish it was making great friends, or being truly moved by one of my classes or just not living in a pandemic at the time. All of those things came eventually, but they required extra time and patience.
So the first month of my college experience was about something I was all too familiar with. I’d only been a Flyers fan since 2014, a passion started by, of all things, one of their players renting the house across the street from me. You see, when the 2019-20 season began, the Flyers hadn’t so much as won a playoff series since 2012. For my formative years of Flyers fandom, they were objectively and painfully mid. And of course, the one time they were actually playing at an elite level, COVID-19 came in and wiped out the season for a while.
Instead of watching the first round of the playoffs during spring break of my senior year of high school at home with my friends and family (or perhaps a sold-out Wells Fargo Center), I saw the Flyers come out flat in the first round of the 2020 playoffs in August playing in front of zero fans in “the bubble.” Though the team looked good in a round robin set-up for the top teams in each conference, allowing them to claim the No. 1 seed in the league, that good form left them once the playoffs truly began for them against the Montreal Canadiens. Their once-strong special teams were in the toilet. The Canadiens outshot the Flyers 178-148 and even outscored them 13-11 across the six-game series.
Somehow, when the dust settled, it was the Flyers who emerged from the round victorious. My laptop’s stream gave out with 10 seconds left in the final game, preventing me from actually seeing the end in real-time. But once I realized they had advanced, I still pumped my fist and blasted our win song out of my miniature speaker.
Getting there was ugly. It certainly didn’t play out anything like I’d imagined it would for the prior six years. But they did it, and there was some level of joy that hitting that threshold instantly triggered, no matter the countless sub-optimal circumstances surrounding it.
That feeling is back on my mind as my last few days as Sports Editor slowly slip into the rearview mirror. It’s been a dizzying year just within The Observer for me, let alone everything else that goes into the life of a college senior trying to find a future in an industry that is both highly competitive and seeing jobs cut at a consistent and terrifying rate. I learned how to design the actual pages you may be reading right now and wound up spending way more time doing that than I initially anticipated. There were articles celebrating great triumph and memorializing agonizing defeat, stories written with tremendous detail and, admittedly, some rushed ones thrown together at the last minute. Former Sports Editor Mannion McGinley really wasn’t kidding about juggling all those spreadsheets.
Yeah, there have been a lot of late nights since last March. And yet, here we are. After racking up over 100 bylines (a fancy word for my name at the top of articles, something I didn’t know until I was several years into my time at this paper) as Sports Editor and over 200 overall (with the first individual one being about those 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs), the end is closing in.
Like so many seniors, I moved into some leadership roles, both at the paper and also as an RA in my dorm, Siegfried Hall. There are some similarities between the two positions and also a lot of differences. The hardest part about both, though, is trying to self-evaluate. Sure, you can look at readership metrics or count the number of people who come by your room as ways to measure success, but there’s no end-all, be-all metric to definitively call my time in either role (or any other) an objective success or failure.
That hasn’t stopped me from thinking a lot about it, though. I really admired my past Sports Editors and RAs. They were people I looked up to and asked for help. I wanted to be that for others, but those are things you can’t force.
It’s been a blast to work with the talented, kind people on the sports staff and our editorial board. Sunday afternoon meetings and Thursday night production shifts had the default “work” color assigned to them on my calendar, but they were when I had some of my most fun. The stress of initially stepping into the role quickly eased into laughter and excitement as the year progressed.
Notre Dame won two national championships almost immediately after I started in the role, cementing its fencing dynasty and men’s lacrosse found its long-awaited breakthrough. Football season started with the highest of highs and still had a hopeful ending despite some really rough patches in the middle. It quickly gave way to Baraka Bouts and men’s soccer’s national title run and basketball seasons that have also had their lows but are trending in the right direction, even if their final records couldn’t look more different.
Xavier Watts was named the nation’s top defensive player. The Cavanagh brothers and the big three of Notre Dame women’s lacrosse have made dominance look routine. Ryan Bischel stopped everything that moved -- again. Hannah Hidalgo transcended every expectation for a freshman. And countless other faces stepped into the spotlight and carved out their illustrious Irish legacies.
It was great to tell and/or oversee the telling of these great stories and so many more. I’d love to keep doing so indefinitely, but sports are all about growth. I want to stay, but I also know that it’s time to start moving on.
I definitely didn’t transcend what it meant to be Sports Editor, which was never the expectation. I just wanted to do a good job, have fun and foster an environment where others could do the same. Mistakes have definitely been made, though I think I’ve at least done that. But that’s a subjective evaluation.
Here’s what isn’t: I made it. The end of my 366 days (thanks, leap year!) or so as Sports Editor is about to arrive, with the conclusion of my four-year journey at The Observer not far behind. It started with Zoom meetings and the fear of writing about anything other than hockey and baseball, transitioned into the thrill of writing feature stories and previewing not one but two championship appearances for my Philadelphia teams (don’t ask what happened in them) and has contained just about everything during my time on staff.
Did I succeed? Those here and around me seem to think I have, which is good enough for me. That’s still subjective, though. Objectively, though, I made it. That isn’t everything, but it matters to me. And nothing that happens after this would be possible without reaching that step.
