5 Story Ideas

• Come up with at least five story ideas for your personal story (one paragraph per idea) and post in your personal category using the tag “brainstorming” by September 2.

1. My first story idea is the multisport athlete story I posted about on Wednesday. Multisport athletes tend to begin their sport later and life and have more success at an older age compared to other athletes in one of their sports. For example, most elite triathletes find the sport after competing as a swimmer or a runner in college and begin triathlon after graduation.
2. College’s phasing out Olympic sports has become a huge issue in recent years. The USOC recently created a position solely to work on keeping Olympic sports, such as wrestling and men’s gymnastics, at the collegiate level.
3. Women joining men’s sports teams has increased drastically over recent years, namely in high school football. The kicker position has attracted a lot of females looking to play football with no other place to go but their high school team. Last year, Northview’s Olivia Mitrovich became the first female to score points in a GHSA Football playoff game.
4. Since our team story is about high school transfers, an interesting take that I know I already discussed with you (Suggs) is the turnover of college coaching. Not just in football, but in all sports. It seems like every year there are huge questions of who is going to become XYZ’s next greatest coach and lead them to the playoffs. When that coach is only as good as the last one, they are out the door again. Do athletic departments have unrealistic expectations of their coaching staffs?
5. Lastly, this is almost a little contradictory to my first story idea, but diving into the emergence of women’s triathlon as a Division I sport and identifying how that will effect swimming and running programs across the country, as opportunities arise for women to choose triathlon in college. Also could discus how this will impact the Olympic pipeline.

It looks like you have a lot of well-thought out ideas. I like the idea of multi-sport athletes the most, especially since it’s something we don’t hear a lot — do they take the risk in playing the sport they might not be as good at? When and how is the decision made to focus on one sport? Is the prominence of that sport a factor in the decision? What is the general policy amoung the USOC about promoting or discouraging in multi-sport athletes? How does school fit in? How does it affect family life? I think that this is very prescient given Rio last month, and could be a good way to explore that as well as the debriefing that comes with the end of the games and the transition period back into training and the other sports or activities the athletes may participate in.