◆ I cover local sports in four Central Jersey counties for publications that are part of the USA Today New Jersey Network. Stories occasionally appear in the Asbury Park Press/app.com and Bergen Record/NorthJersey.com. ◆ In 2017, I won a first place in the New Jersey Press Association annual awards competition for Scholastic Writing Portfolio. In 2020, I wrote about the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on athletes and how communities responded. ◆ My duties include uploading articles into the CMS, writing headlines and taglines, promoting the article on social media and taking pictures when a photographer isn’t available. Additionally, I vote in the New Jersey Wrestling Writers Association Top 20 poll. ◆ From Sept. 2008 to Feb. 2016, I was a freelancer and mostly covered high school football games on deadline through snow, wind and sun-drenched September afternoons.

Wrote IRELAND’S PROFESSIONAL AMATEURS, an 85,000-word book about how Ireland’snative sports of hurling and Gaelic football intersect with Irish culture and history. ◆ Conducted research by traveling throughout Ireland for nine months from parishes in the smallest county of Leitrim to cities like Dublin, Belfast and Derry.◆ Chapters include a small coastal parish’s connection to its Cinderella team, a team trying to beat a curse and the sports’ connection to the Irish language, gambling (a team won 50,000 euros betting on itself), the Celtic Tiger economy and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.◆ Selected First Place in the Reader Views Literary awards. Co-authored HOW TO REVIEW TAX RETURNS, along with my father Edward. He has been on Accounting Today’s Top 100 Influential People List for the last five years. Dad took care of the technical stuff. I helped organize it into book form. For an outsider like myself, it seems that reviewing tax returns is a simple thing. For firms, however, it’s often a challenge to accurately and quickly complete reviews in the hectic pace of tax season. The book provided novel approaches to help ease the burden.

I was the full-time New Jersey editor, writer and photographer for an Oklahoma-based company that expanded across the country to cover high school sports. Unfortunately, the company killed its expansion after three months because of a lack of funding. In the short time, however, I honed my skills in editing and promotion. Highlights included interviewing Jim Nantz in a lengthy Q&A and writing about two former NFL players returning to their alma mater as assistants.

◆ Stories for the 32,000-circulation newspaper included game coverage on tight deadline, features, breaking news, notebooks and in-depth pieces.◆ Memorable articles included writing about a 16-year-old playing basketball two weeks after giving birth; a football team playing its homecoming game two hours away because of the Washington D.C. sniper scare; spending a day with an Olympic hopeful; racing the area’s fastest runner to see what speed feels like and telling about a basketball team that had its season suspended after a player defected in an opposing locker room. USA Today mentioned the article in its national sports roundup section. ◆ Duties included completing scoreboard page, editing wire stories and writing headlines for inside pages.◆ Won four Virginia Press Association awards.

◆ Wrote over 250 articles covering high school sports, drag racing and minor league baseball◆ Memorable moments include writing about the country’s foremost home run historian and his busy time during the 1998 chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa; learning about the roars and smells of drag racing and trying to make deadline on assignment when, inevitably, the outside phone line wouldn’t work in the pre-WiFi era.