What I do best

I will never forget it. It was late April, 2005. I was only 13 years old; just starting to really get into sports. Football was my favorite; I dreamed of playing wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, but I was just starting to realize that I didn't have the wheels to do it. I had always liked writing, I had (and still have) the September 22 2002 issue of Sports Illustrated. That issue has an article in it called 'How Good Can Randy Mosss be?' by Michael Silver, and it was that piece that got me started on sports journalism.

At about 10 o'clock that morning, I began searching the AM dial on my radio for a way to listen to the NFL Draft, because there was no ESPN in my house. As the draft started, I instantly fell in love with the concept, the excitement, and the overall event. By the next year, I was a draft junkie. I searched every corner of the internet for the latest draft news and rumors, I made countless draft boards and mock drafts. It consumed my life from January to the very second it was over.

That was just the begening. Little did I know that my innocent fasination with the NFL Draft would eventually lead me down the path I am on now.

So how did this happen? I went from a draft enthusiast to wanting to make it my career. This led me to email a certain national sports writer named Gregg Doyle (who at the time was co-hosting a local radio talk show) and ask how I should go about doing this. Doyle was soon let go form that postion at the radio station, but partially through him, I became friends with his co-host, Mo Egger, who continued to be on the air. Egger would have me on his show several times, mostly as a regular caller, but a few times as an actual guest to talk about the draft, while Doyle suggested soemthing to me that would change my life. Gregg told me that I should go to my local paper and ask if they had any available postions, no matter how small. He told me that he had started the same way, answering phones at his local newspaper when he was in high school, and had even gotten the opportunity to write a couple paragraphs of a story.

I expected nothing more. But mere days after I had walked into The Brown County Press office, I was with the sports editor at a high school basketball game. That's where I am now, a sports reporter for the world's smallest paper, but a sports reporter nonetheless. That's me. That's who I am in a nutshell.

Honestly, I didn't even realize that my career in journalism started with the NFL Draft as much as it did until I wrote this story. But I'm glad that I got started writing about sports, because it's what I do best.

Some of my work...

I recently went to the C103 Basketball All-Star game, during halftime of the boy's game, I sat under the hoop for the slam-dunk competition. These are my best pictures from that event.

Jeremy Sharp's blog, take two

Okay, the last time I set up a blog, it reached one hundred hits per day. That was nice. But unfortunately, the site I was blogging on (thelotd.com) is apparently no more. So now, under the instruction of my Graphic Communications teacher at school, I'm starting a new site. Hopefully, it will end up being just as popular as my last one.

I might as well use post number one to babble on a little bit about myself. I am a teenager, 16 to be exact, but instead of having the normal fast-food job that so many of my peers have, I work for the local newspaper. I am a sports reporter for The Brown County Press. How'd I get that job? Simple, I walked into the Press' office and asked for it.

Nowadays, I cover prep sports, anything from baseball, to softball; basketball and more. My dream is to one day, be a nationally recognized sports writer.

Aside from more than a year of taking pictures and writing stories for a real newspaper, my resumé includes a job shadowing at 1530 Homer The Sports Animal, a sports talk radio station in Cincinnati, and several interviews on the Mo Eger show to discuss my many endeavors and my forte: the NFL Draft.

So check me out at www.browncountypress.com, I hope that through this blog, I can gain a few readers, and a lot of feedback, to further my journalism career.