Two Pitch Ideas:
- A feature on the UNE weight room in the Harold Alfond Forum, and how the environment benefits the different athletic teams on campus.
- A feature on Razor and the Athletic Training staff and their day-to-day schedules.
Early Draft
If you have ever set foot on the UNE campus, chances are you have seen the top notch athletic facilities that the university has to offer. The ice rink at Harold Alfond Forum, home to the nationally ranked UNE men’s hockey team and ultra-competitive women’s hockey team. Blue Storm Stadium, where the football and softball teams battle during their respective seasons, and Blue Bolt Field, where the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams as well as the field hockey team trample their completion. Now what if I told you there was another facility where these athletes crush their competition?
The athletic weight room here at UNE is a space that features twelve racks with weights ranging from 2.5 lbs. to 45 lb. weights, which are also known as “plates.” The blue turf that defines the athletic fields is also present inside the weight room. About thirty-five yards of blue turf stretch across the right side of the weight room, that allow athletes to warm-up, do agility drills, and push sleds just like they would if they were on the field. The walls are lined with acronyms such as G.R.I.T. and other sayings. All of the weights and dumbbells are organized with the logo facing up and everything is wiped down and put away neatly after every team or individual lift session.
Workshop Draft
If you have ever set foot on the UNE campus, chances are you have seen the top notch athletic facilities that the university has to offer. The ice rink at Harold Alfond Forum, home to the nationally ranked UNE men’s hockey team and ultra-competitive women’s hockey team. Blue Storm Stadium, where the football and softball teams battle during their respective seasons, and Blue Bolt Field, where the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams as well as the field hockey team trample their completion. Now what if I told you there was another facility where these athletes crush their competition?
The athletic weight room here at UNE is a space that features twelve racks with weights ranging from 2.5 lbs. to 45 lb. weights, which are also known as “plates.” The blue turf that defines the athletic fields is also present inside the weight room. About thirty-five yards of blue turf stretch across the right side of the weight room, that allow athletes to warm-up, do agility drills, and push sleds just like they would if they were on the field. The walls are lined with acronyms such as G.R.I.T. and other sayings, and all of the weights and dumbbells are organized with the logo facing up and everything is wiped down and put away neatly after every team or individual lift session.
The staff in the weight room also set the tone for the type of environment that the Nor’easters walk into for every session. The weight room provides a unique opportunity for athletes and non-athletes alike who major in Athletic Training, AES, or simply need a work-study job. Students have the opportunity to work the desk at the front of the room, and keep the weight room cleaned an organized. Those students, along with coaching interns also work hands on with Interim Strength & Conditioning Coach Jameson Collins, who believes the extra help is useful, “When you guys (football) are in here, it’s good to have an extra two or three people available to make sure equipment is being used properly, and guys are using the right techniques,” Collins said.
Coach Collins, who previously graduated from Saint Joseph’s and worked for Springfield College, says that those are places don’t utilize the students who work in the facility, “Unless you were a coach or athlete, you didn’t do much in the weight room.” Collins went on to say that working with teams early on can improve the student’s chances to get an internship or job shadowing ATs or at another university or professional team.
Revised/Final Draft
Sculpting Athletes and Futures
‘The Forum’ weight room prepares athletes for competition, and students for their careers
By Nick Scarfo
The clock just strikes seven o’clock and the sun is still slowly making its way over the trees behind the Forum parking lot. At this time, the football team is well into their workout, grinding through their last sets of squat, bench, or cleans, before moving onto the next stage of the workout. Trails of sweat cover the floor, as players go through the different exercises, fist bumping each other as they pass by, or bobbing their heads to the rap or rock n roll that’s pulsing through the speakers.
The weight room in the Harold Alfond Forum is where the football team begins their mornings Monday through Friday. Other teams file in at other times throughout the week, and you can always find someone in there getting extra work in.
After undergoing renovation in 2017 to accommodate football and rugby, the weight room looks vastly different than what it did just three years ago.
The space features twelve racks with weights ranging from 2.5 lbs. to 45 lb. weights, which are also known as “plates.” The blue turf that defines the athletic fields is also present inside the weight room. About thirty-five yards of blue turf stretch across the right side of the weight room, that allow athletes to warm-up, do agility drills, and push sleds just like they would if they were on the field. The walls are lined with acronyms such as G.R.I.T. and other sayings, and all of the weights and dumbbells are organized with the logo facing up and everything is wiped down and put away neatly after every team or individual lift session.
Junior Joe Kucky, who has been a member of the football team since 2017 believes the environment in the weight room greatly improves the workouts for himself as well as his teammates, “We have great intensity and are motivated to get better and stronger,” Kucky said. “It is also helping the team build chemistry we need to compete on the field.”
As someone who likes to workout in his spare time, Kucky also finds it useful that he can access the weight room whenever he a gap in his schedule, “Being able to go in at any time and do extra work is very beneficial,” Kucky stated.
The staff in the weight room also set the tone for the type of environment that the Nor’easters walk into for every session.
The weight room provides a unique opportunity for athletes and non-athletes alike who major in Athletic Training, AES, or simply need a work-study job. Students have the opportunity to work the desk at the front of the room, and keep the weight room cleaned and organized. One of those interns is Freshman athletic training major Hannah Ehlers, who became a certified personal trainer in high school, and asked over the summer if she could help out with teams.
Since becoming an intern in the weight room, Coach Hannah, as the football team calls her, has gained some valuable experience working with the team, “I realized that strength and conditioning requires me to be even more confident,” Ehlers said, “I didn’t realize how tedious programming was and the science behind it. To create one week worth of workouts you have to think months in the future and how athletes will progress.”
Gaining that experience of working with teams, along with physically performing daily tasks of keeping the weight room clean and organized, will help students like Ehlers, who wishes to be a certified strength and conditioning specialist, make a difference in their fields after graduation, and keep the weight room environment where it needs to be for the athletes to be able to perform on the field.
Workshop Experience
The feedback I got from everyone today was very helpful. For the first draft, I wanted to get all the ideas I wanted to include on paper. I appreciated the feedback on my lead, since even I was unsure about it when I was first writing it. Having less ambiguity when it comes to delivering my lead, and getting into more specific detail about the weight room will help readers understand where I am going with my story. I am also currently in the process of getting quotes from players from the different teams and the student coaches that work with those teams. The entire class gave good feedback on my word choice when it came to quoting my sources. When drafting my next feature, I have to be more careful with how I want to portray the way my sources are speaking about something, and make sure I portray their thoughts accurately. I also came away with more of an understanding on how a headline can help with the flow of the story. I always thought it was better to formulate a headline after you have written a draft or majority of a story, but I learned today that a headline could actually be a good starting point to help create a clear angle for a story.
Editorial Team Reflection
As the weeks went on, and more of us became more comfortable sharing our thoughts, our workshopping time became more and more detailed. I found myself benefitting from the advice
I was given on my own paper, as well as the advice that was given to some of the other writers in the class.
One of the consistent pieces of advice given was regarding narrative and what type of voice is appropriate to incorporate into a story. For example, we agreed as a class, for the most part, using first person pronouns like I and me wouldn’t work for the types of feature stories we wanted to produce for this assignment. Structure of paragraphs, sentences, and quotes were all important parts of the workshop experience as well. I was reminded that for this type of writing, you want your paragraphs to be shorter and not as wordy, in order to keep the readers engaged and on track with the angle of the story.
Sentence connotation was important, because the words we choose shape the meaning of the sentence. I went to set up a quote I had comparing UNE’s weight room to another schools. The way I structured the sentence ultimately set up the quote to seem negative, which wasn’t how my source came off when speaking to me. The sentences you create need to paint accurate descriptions of events and quotations.
Going off of that, it is important to decide whether it is appropriate to paraphrase a quote or directly quote your source. Some stories, as we have seen, allow for this, while more informative stories, such as the ones highlighting parking rules and procedures, should have direct quotations. Again, as we have all learned, it is important to keep in mind the message you wish to show through the story as you decide what type of voice you are going to put into your article.
Feature Story Reflection
The past feature story project was very useful and fun for me. As an aspiring journalist, I got to get some new insight on how to write effective feature stories from all of my classmates who were also actively learning. My classmates and I can use the lessons and techniques we learned from this assignment, and carry them into our profile project, and other writing assignments we may have to do for other classes.
As a writer, I enjoyed writing a feature about something I thought the UNE community should know more about. I liked the process of coming up with my idea, to having to get quotes to bring more voice into my feature. Having multiple people review my feature story was also very helpful. I got some feedback and ideas that I was able to put into my story that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.
As an editor, I enjoyed reading the feature stories that my classmates came up with. It was interesting to see the topics that were chosen, and how each person decided on how they were going to write about that topic. I found it interesting that there were multiple feature stories about parking, however, not one story sounded or was written like the other one. I also was able to gain some good ideas from giving feedback and reading other feature stories, that I believe helped me further develop my own feature story.
When I went to go finalize my feature story, I changed who I decided to quote in my article, because my original quotation didn’t fit the flow of the rest of my feature story. I got that idea from my workshopping period when we talked about sentence connotation. Although I left a lot of my original information and writing in my story, my revised piece looked a lot different than my workshop draft, and that was due to the diligent writing, editing, and workshopping I did as an individual, but also the efforts we took as a class to help each other create quality feature stories.
