This issue concludes my fifth semester as the sports editor of the Technique. If you are keeping score, Tech athletics have largely not turned out all that well in the last few years. For the second time in my three years here, football did not make a bowl game, the sort of disappointment which was unthinkable shortly before I arrived on campus. Men’s basketball followed up its most promising season in years with an absolutely snakebitten 2017–18 campaign. The athletic director left for Purdue. The men’s basketball coach was fired. The softball coach was gone. That right there is more than three years worth of tumult.
Yet at the end of every one of those five semesters at the helm (and countless times during those semesters), I sit down and ask myself a question.
Why are they letting me do this?
Sometimes that feeling pops up when I am sitting in a football postgame press conference, sandwiched in between a reporter from ESPN and one from the AJC. Other times, it is in the press box high over Bobby Dodd, or on the floor at McCamish, or speaking with a coach in his office. It is not impostor syndrome. I know that I work hard to be a good sports editor (whether I succeed is your determination to make). I know that I deserve the chance to be treated like a member of the media.
But the fact that I do receive that professional respect still pleasantly surprises me every time.
So as I wrap up my penultimate year occupying the ‘Sports Editor’ slot on this section’s header, I just want to thank everyone who has made this incredible, confusing, rewarding situation possible.
Thanks to everyone at the Georgia Tech Athletic Association who has looked a college student straight in the eye and promised him an interview with the head coach of the men’s basketball team. Thanks to the national media outlets who have shown me nothing but respect when our paths cross. Thanks to John, Rohan, Josh, Emily and every other writer. Thanks to you, for picking up this newspaper, turning to these pages at the very back, and reading the sports section.
You have made this possible and I could not be happier.