Life can be a balancing act sometimes, and my experience in the SID profession is a perfect example.

I’ve had several challenges over the last few years on the personal front as well as the job and school front. Most recently, my biggest challenge came in the spring of my final year as a graduate assistant (so earlier this year). I was finishing up a thesis focused on hashtag use in college football rivalry games, while also handling my usual GA stuff as our men’s tennis contact. However, that came with a bit of a twist this time around. In December, our longtime primary women’s basketball contact took a job elsewhere, leading to some shifting around in the department to make sure every sport got the coverage it needed. This meant that our usual track and field contact shifted over to women’s basketball until the end of the season, leaving open a spot for track coverage, with which I was asked to handle until the end of women’s basketball season.

I had worked with sports that competed in the same season before, but this was a bit different. In the fall of 2017, I handled women’s soccer and men’s tennis. While both were competing at the same time, fall tennis is a bit different than in the spring, primarily because it is all individual and we have no home matches, so I cover everything remotely. The same went for this fall, when I traveled with cross country but covered tennis – again, remotely. This spring, I had the challenge of balancing track coverage during indoor (and part of outdoor) season, traveling if men’s tennis was not at home. One of the biggest challenges with this part was when I would be at a track meet, while a men’s tennis match was getting started.

Luckily, my versatility came into play here, which helped me overcome that challenge. I improvised with an old iPad from home – the iPad 2, in case you were wondering, where I could have a screen big enough to see live stats at tennis and tweet updates while I’m down covering track and field events. Basically, the moral of the story is that sometimes, we must improvise with what we have when we’re in a crunch in order to overcome some challenges – no matter how small they may seem.

Also, on the thesis, because you may be wondering how that panned out—I successfully defended it and am on track to graduate on May 2 with my master’s degree in kinesiology with a concentration in sport administration! After that, a new challenge awaits: finishing up tennis season (with hopefully a run to the NCAA Championship) and find out where my next step will be as an athletic communications professional! That is a challenge I am excited for, and cannot wait to see how it unfolds.