Jordan’s Updated Story Memo

 

I wasn’t exactly sure how much information was needed in the update, so I tried to add in any new developments to the original post I made about my story.

There is a famous statistic in college football that since the Southeastern Conference created the SEC Championship Game in 1992, 21 of the 23 coaches who won it played for the title at least once in their first three seasons in the SEC.

With this thinking in mind, I want to explore the characteristics of high school football coaches in the state of Georgia who have made the state playoffs in the last five years and determine on average how long the coach has been at his school. While this is a lot of information, I know this will give me a large sample size to consider and that I have the resources to find these answers.

As I’ve begun to gather the data for this story regarding high school football coaches, I’ve had a lot of luck in making sure my sample size was large enough to be considered. I’ve gathered the playoff teams from classifications AAAAAA down to A private and public schools beginning with last season going back to 2011. With each school, I will find the head coach during that particular season, the number of years at that time, his total number of seasons as a head coach in Georgia, his winning percentage with that school and his overall winning percentage.

The goal from this story is to write something that essentially outlines what makes a high school coach that can take his team to the playoffs. I want to get in touch with several coaches for this story, and I actually think my profile on Jeff Herron is going to be incredibly helpful in this situation. Herron has an impressive coaching tree in that several of his former assistants have gone on to become head coaches. While I contact those coaches to discuss Herron, I can also talk to them about the numbers I’ve found.

My main question is will this be a case like the SEC where a fairly new coach is often the one who can lead his team to success, or is longevity more likely to be the factor that helps a program reach the postseason? Also, how extreme are the coaches who stand out as the outliers among their peers?

Along with the main story that centers on digesting the statistics and hearing from some of these coaches and why this is happening, I will make an infographic both showing this information as well as coaches who fit the profile of the average Georgia high school coach in the playoffs. I also plan to do a sidebar on a coach who stands as an outlier, whether that be a coach who’s been at one team for many more years than his peers or someone brand new to his team.

Personal Story // Memo

I’m looking at how age/college experience of NBA Draft picks correlates to NBA success. The independent variable (primary predictor) I’m keying in on is the amount of college games played, in 5 Tiers:  <10 , 10-33 , 31 – 60,  61-90 , 91-120+.The dependent variable will be # of NBA games played.

Graphics

  • Im think of plotting the player points  in a 4 quadrant graph to plot the points data. My pool of players would be players selected in the last 20 years (that may be ambitious), with color coordinating for lottery (1-15), first round, and second round picks.

Key questions:

  • What are some other determinants for NBA success?
    • PER, career Prass (Points+Rebound+assists) average
    • major award winners
      • MVP/ROY
      • All-NBA team appearances
  • Why hasn’t the Brandon Jennings theory caught on?
    • Some blue chip HS players like Brandon Jennings, Jeremy Tyler chose to forego college and play overseas for a year before coming to the NBA. Tyler is out the league, and Brandon Jennings is a sixth man for the New York Knicks (his 4th team in 7 years)

Sources:

  • Agents
  • Players (going to Hawks media day Monday)
  • Coaches //and scouts if available
  • NBA media members (Woj, Zach Lowe)

 

Revised story memo – Clarkson High School cross country

I spoke with the head coach of the Clarkson High School cross country team, and after that, I feel confident that is the team I want to dive into as I tell the story about refugee resettlement in Clarkston, Georgia. It sounds like access is not going to be an issue. This is a coach who I’ve interviewed before for a previous story, and he said I would be welcome to come for any practices or meets I need. I’m also planning to reach out to the school’s principal to talk about what I’m doing and to make sure I won’t run into any issues. I also want to take some time exploring the Clarkston to get a feel for the community.

I gravitated toward a team at a public high school because it seems like the concept of refugees assimilating to a high school’s culture and routine can be used as a microcosm of immigrants coming into a new country.

I also think I need to find one or a few personal stories from athletes on the team to use in my story. Focusing on the lives of an athlete, his siblings and his parents will be an effective way to tell the story.

Below is my original story memo with changes and additions now that I have determined the route I hope to take.

Topic: The intersection between sports and refugee resettlement, using Clarkston High School’s cross country team as a lens

Key questions to consider and how to answer them:

  • What is it like to immigrate to a new country as a refugee child?
    • Talk to high-school aged students and their families
    • Ask athletic coaches how sports affect the process of a student adjusting to a new place
    • What is it like to become a part of a public high school? Is it comforting to be at a high school that has a high population of refugees?
  • How do refugee children get involved with sports?
    • Do parents see it as something that will help them be part of the community? Is it the child that initiates the desire to play?
    • What challenges arise if the sport the child plays is not a sport that was present in their home country? Based on the story I did last year, it sounded like most of these runners come to America with a lot of experience in soccer, but they’ve never heard of cross country.
    • How much does it cost a family to pay for a kid to be involved with sports? Are refugee children ever kept from sports due to the financial burden? Are there any costs to be a part of a public high school cross country team?
  • What is the team dynamic like and what messages does it send to the athletes and observers?
    • How many different home countries are represented on the team?
    • Are there ever language barriers?
    • Were the coaches refugees or immigrants? How do they lead a diverse team of students adjusting to a new life?
    • How do coaches and teammates help throughout the adjustment process in ways apart from sports?
    • What lessons do the coaches hope to teach through sports?
  • What makes the cross country team successful, especially since many might not have run cross country prior to moving to the U.S.?
  • What struggles have the athletes faced? Xenophobia?
  • How did Clarkston become a hub for refugee resettlement?
    • What are other similar refugee resettlement towns in the United States?
    • What made Clarkston a good fit for immigrants?

Sources:

  • Coaches – Wesley Etienne, cross country head coach
  • Athletes
  • Families (Etienne said it might be hard to get parents. Most don’t speak English. But he said older siblings could work as good sources too.)
  • Teachers who have knowledge of the adjusting process outside of sports
  • Dr. Michelle Jones, Clarkston High School principal
  • Someone unaffiliated with the team or school who has knowledge of Clarkston’s history as a refugee resettlement town

Possible multimedia ideas:

  • Maybe a graph that shows the demographic makeup of Clarkson High School
  • Timeline or maps that show where the athletes come from and how and when they got to the U.S.

Revised Story Memo

Given the time constraints of the semester, I think the best angle for my personal story would be to focus on the have/have-not issues in terms of NCAA compliance. This would likely manifest as a case study type of story, comparing the programs at Georgia and a smaller NCAA school in the area.

I would still like to explore the bigger picture questions I listed in my first memo, but it will be on a smaller scale and focused on just a few scales. I’m hoping to find some valuable statistics and information from the NCAA to extrapolate on trends I might find, but my reporting will be focused on compliance programs at UGA and another school, like Savannah State or wherever I can get access.

Key questions

Which schools have NCAA compliance programs? Is money a major factor?

Are these programs effective?

What do compliance directors do in their daily work?

How are athletes and athletics affected by these programs?

Does the NCAA view Power 5 schools differently than smaller schools in terms of compliance and enforcement?

Personal Story Memo

For my personal story, I intend to write on the current state of triathlon in the U.S. and more specifically, diving into how the addition of women’s NCAA triathlon could impact the sport in the upcoming years.

Several junior athletes choose to compete in either swimming or cross country and track in college and either give up triathlon or return after college. This exploratory piece will examine top triathletes, some who are in NCAA triathlon and others who are not. Additionally, I hope to spend a day with the Queen’s University NCAA triathlon team and examine a day in the life.

Personal Story Memo: Braves Parking

For me, my story on the Braves and the parking around SunTrust Park will be about the people. Given the new developments with this issue, the questions I have change a bit, but are still in flux with the public hearings on the proposed changes to the ordinance.

  1. If the ordinance remains the same, what were the reservations of this proposal, and how do these businesses and offices feel about it? This will be done mostly through cold calls and talking to people around the area
  2. How involved were the Braves exactly in these policies? I’ll have calls to make to the Braves, even if their willingness to talk might be minimal.
  3. What are the economic implications behind this? Are there similar or comparable models? I can call economics professors and experts like we discussed. This could be a potential sidebar.
  4. The hearings will now presumably be a big part of this story. What is said and argued on both sides will reveal a lot about the motives of both sides as well as the political motivations on both sides.
  5. Are there people affected who blindly support the Braves coming and are in favor of all of this? I imagine there are some who see the Braves coming as a positive and are willing to forgive potential shortcomings.
  6. From the Braves’ perspective, reiterating why it is they are making this move from a dollars perspective, and why they see fit to capitalize on as much as they can (i.e. $4.6 million from parking last season)
  7. This is kind of a throwaway, but I know we talked about it, and I’d love to get the Braves on record about the decision to count down the days until Turner Field closes and ask a few questions about the rationale and whether or not they considered how it might look from the outside beyond a PR move to get people associated with the team at the park to “celebrate.”

I’m really excited about reporting on this, as it is something that could not be more timely and pertinent with these revisions just being proposed and things getting finalized one way or another in the next month and a half. I look forward to digging in as things unfold, and these are the major things I hope to discover and report on.

Story Memo

Following our meeting on Thursday, I’m still really interested in both of my story ideas but I’m worried about my personal connections in the horse business and that they might cause some interference. I think it could be a interesting story but I don’t want the lines to get blurred.

As for my other idea about the guarantees of the SEC with scheduling the big games. I obviously talked mostly about basketball and that’s what sparked my interest. But I could widen it to other sports or just focus on basketball. With this story, you said it would be a lot of phone work and I don’t mind doing that.

I want to focus on the pros and cons of scheduling these big games, but I want to address how a school decides to play another. Whether it’s for money reasons (Nichols State getting paid to come to here and play UGA football) or other reasons. With UNC / UK that’s been a long standing rivarly game in basketball and I’m interested why Roy Williams wanted to end that. I could try and contact UK and see how they feel about this change.

I think there will be a lot of numbers involved with this story and think I might need to use some graphics to help organize and show my facts more clearly.

Personal Story Memo

I want to get into the changing NCAA regulations in collegiate sports, and the difference in the compliance programs between Power 5 schools and other, smaller conferences. This story will likely involve a good amount of number-crunching and analytic work, which is exciting for me.

Topic: Trends in NCAA regulations, compliance programs

Key questions
1. How have NCAA regulations changed In the past 20 years or so?
– Compare regulations and what constitutes a violation, according to NCAA bylaws from 2016 and any other available years.
2. Has there been an increase/decrease in violations during this time? Why?
-Chart major violations over the past 20 years or so. Are they infractions of new regulations? Is there a “learning curve” for changing NCAA regs?
3. Who has NCAA compliance programs? Are they concentrated in Power 5 schools?
– Search major school websites and contact athletic departments, check policies of Power 5 conferences
4. What do these compliance programs actually do? Are they effective?
– Interview compliance directors and other officials who oversee the programs
– Chart the violations and infractions of major universities with compliance programs
– Interview athletes and coaches from these schools to find out the culture of compliance and NCAA regulations in their programs
5. How do schools without compliance programs monitor their athletes and programs to avoid violations?
– Compare Power 5 schools with “have not” universities in terms of the frequency and severity of infractions
– Interview athletes and coaches at these schools for comparison
6. Case studies of NCAA violations
– Charleston Southern
– Todd Gurley
– SMU “death penalty”
– etc.

I’m seeing infographics galore for this story, including maps, charts and other visual comparison and trend tools.

This has the potential to be a deep story, so I know it will evolve as I start researching and I might not be able to cover everything I have listed. But in an ideal world, these are the questions I would like to dig in to for my personal story.

Jordan’s Personal Story Memo

There is a famous statistic in college football that since the Southeastern Conference created the SEC Championship Game in 1992, 21 of the 23 coaches who won it played for the title at least once in their first three seasons in the SEC.

With this thinking in mind, I want to explore the characteristics of high school football coaches in the state of Georgia who have made the state playoffs in the last five years and determine on average how long the coach has been at his school. While this is a lot of information, I know this will give me a large sample size to consider and that I have the resources to find these answers.

My main question is will this be a case like the SEC where a fairly new coach is often the one who can lead his team to success, or is longevity more likely to be the factor that helps a program reach the postseason? Also, how extreme are the coaches who stand out as the outliers among their peers?

Along with the main story that centers on digesting the statistics and hearing from some of these coaches and why this is happening, I will make an infographic both showing this information as well as coaches who fit the profile of the average Georgia high school coach in the playoffs. I also plan to do a sidebar on a coach who stands as an outlier, whether that be a coach who’s been at one team for many more years than his peers or someone brand new to his team.

Refugee resettlement and sports personal story memo

I tried to write this memo in a way that it could be applied for either Fugees Family or Clarkson High School cross country team. I will settle on one of those routes next week after I talk to the coaches and see what type of access I could get.

Broad topic: The intersection between sports and refugee resettlement

Key questions to consider and how to answer them:

  • What is it like to acclimate to a new country as a refugee child?
    • Talk to high-school aged students and their families
    • Ask athletic coaches how sports affect the process of a student adjusting to a new place
    • What is it like to become a part of a public high school? Is it comforting to be at a high school that has a high population of refugees?
  • How do refugee children get involved with sports?
    • Do parents see it as something that will help them be part of the community? Is it the child that initiates the desire to play?
    • What challenges arise if the sport the child plays is not a sport that was present in their home country?
    • How much does it cost a family to pay for a kid to be involved with sports? Are refugee children ever kept from sports due to the financial burden?
  • What is the team dynamic like and what messages does it send to the athletes and observers?
    • How many different home countries are represented on the team?
    • Are there ever language barriers?
    • Were the coaches refugees or immigrants? How do they lead a diverse team of students adjusting to a new life?
    • How do coaches and teammates help throughout the acclimating process in ways apart from sports?
  • What makes the cross country team successful, especially since many might not have run cross country prior to moving to the U.S.?
  • How did Clarkston become a hub for refugee resettlement?
    • What are other similar refugee resettlement towns in the United States?
    • What made Clarkston a good fit for immigrants?

Sources:

  • Coaches
  • Athletes
  • Families
  • Teachers who have knowledge of the adjusting process outside of sports
  • Someone unaffiliated with the team or school who has knowledge of Clarkston’s history as a refugee resettlement town

Possible multimedia ideas:

  • Maybe a graph that shows the demographic makeup of Clarkson High School
  • Timeline or maps that show where the athletes come from and how and when they got to the U.S.