The English department in Athletics: Sports Information
by Daniel Graham ’26
If you’ve spent any time on the Macalester College Athletics website, you will have seen the almost-daily articles that the department posts. All these articles are credited to the ambiguously titled “Macalester Athletic Staff.” That title could apply to any number of people, but sometimes, that person is me.
To be clear, most of the time, that person is my boss, Director of Sports Information Matt McLagan. There are also other student workers who write for him, and in the past, he had different assistants who wrote almost half of the articles with him. McLagan’s Department of Sports Information handles all communications for the athletics department.
This semester, I’m one of McLagan’s writers in Sports Information. While the articles the department publishes span all sorts of Macalester Athletics news, most — and the only ones I write — are post-game recaps that we write for each varsity sport.
The work starts as soon as the game ends. We put the results and statistics on the website, post on social media (if we won the game), and then start to write. The process looks a little different for each sport, but every article seeks to answer the same question: what made this event exciting?
It’s all about storytelling. Sometimes, it’s easy. If I’m writing about a team sport and Macalester played a close game, the story presents itself right away, and I just have to build a narrative around that result. Even blowouts, both wins and losses, can have obvious plotlines — dominance is exciting. For individual sports, any win is a story, and any new record can be a headline.
But sometimes, it’s not so clear. Maybe the game was never close but never really got out of hand, either. Maybe the team’s performance was just okay. The search for the story makes each article into a little puzzle. That puzzle isn’t always welcome; sometimes, I just want to go home. Usually, the puzzle is fun, and when I work it out, I get a little bit of satisfaction with my creation.
Once we’ve written the article, we email it to a few local and national news outlets and post it to the athletics website with a photo. We post that article on social media, and then we’re done.
That process usually takes at least an hour per sport, and it can always take more time, if the story is difficult to find. The real difficulty comes on the major athletics days. In the early days of the spring semester, there can be six to eight different athletics events that happen in one day, and if any of those events happen here at Macalester, the day becomes even longer.
Sports Information isn’t just responsible for the articles on the website, it’s also responsible for the statistics and webcast that happen during each home game. I help run the webcast for many of our games, and those days can get long.
McLagan’s days are always the longest, though. He works each home game, often with statistics but sometimes with the webcast or another area that needs help. I covered for him once before the semester began, and my Saturday began at 11 a.m. and didn’t end until after 8 p.m. — and that was just for two basketball games.
We all enjoy this work, though. We have to, in order to keep up with it. Even on very long days, I remember that I get paid to watch and write about games. I get to follow 19 different teams and hundreds of athletes as they strive for success. I love to watch sports, and I would attend many of these games even if I wasn’t paid to go. There are much worse professions in the world.
Every college athletics department has a Sports Information wing, though they can look very different from one another depending on the college’s size and budget. The job isn’t glamorous or highly paid, and it can take a toll on the people who do it for a long time.
Right now, I don’t plan to go much further in the field; I want to become a sports journalist instead. But I will always think about Sports Information when I visit an athletics website. I’ll think about it when I visit any website, really. Despite the advent of AI, most websites with written content need someone to write for them. There’s always someone in the background, even if you never think about them. Perhaps that someone could be you.