My very first byline and coincidentally, screw up.

Full disclosure:

My sophomore year of college, I was working in my first real newsroom at the Fort Myers News-Press.

I had been shooting a video 2-3 minute highlight videos of high school football games - easy stuff. One day the sports editor, Ed, called me with a new challenge: Taking stats for a football game.

A few things to consider:

1. I knew nothing about football (still don't).
   
2. I had never covered sports before.
3. I had only written one article ever. And it was a 300-word play preview.

"You're a smart girl," he said, "I think you can manage."

Why did I accept?  Well, because I have a serious problem with saying no.


I called another FGCU student who was a sports writer at the News-Press, Carl, and begged him for a quick stat-taking tutorial at Starbucks. He obliged, and did his best to explain to me a random melee of numbers and dashes and passes and receptions.

First downs, 18th downs, touchdowns, touch backs, camels, fountains, palm trees... all random and irrelevant and confusing. In all honesty, he may as well have been speaking Chinese.

Carl humored me, but it was official: I was lost.

I was determined not to fail, however, and that Friday night I drove to Gateway High School with my notebook in hand.

I'll save you the whining, but I fell flat on my face.

Three miserable, cold, stressful hours later I went to the newsroom with about eight crumpled sheets of papers full of dashes and numbers, and handed them to Ed.

Ed: "Okay. Well. How about you write a story? Just six inches. No big deal."

I sat staring blankly at the screen for a solid ten minutes.

I thought to myself: "Oh my God, my journalism career is over. I should just become a housewife. Or, actually, I'll move to Peru. No one knows me there. This was a terrible idea, what was I thinking? They are going to think I'm some idiot blonde girl..."

One of the veteran sports writers sat down with me, and asked me questions about the game.

Veteran: "First off: did anything unique happen?"

Me: "Er, my notes say this kid had a 98-yard touchdown."

Veteran: "What? Okay. We can, uh, write that."

I was impossibly close to tears, and sobbed my eyes out the second I got into my driver's seat of my PT Cruiser.

This is my very first byline. It's terrible. I will admit it. You can laugh.

But practice makes perfect, and this is my sports writing two years later.