The Miami Student’s sports coverage through the years

In April, 2025, The Miami Student won multiple awards at the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) conference, including the 2025 Corbin Gwaltney Award for Best All-Around Student Newspaper. In addition to this, The Student’s Sports section received the honor of first place in Sports Coverage from the Ohio News Media Association in 2024.

Looking back, the path to The Student’s recognition in sports writing and photography stretches over 100 years, marked by adaptations in journalistic style, newsroom atmospheres and community landscapes.

The Student began printing before the university had any official sports teams. Brief mentions of club athletics sprang up in the late 1800s, with the writers highlighting “the practice of athletic sports” like football, baseball and tennis as an important means of recreation on campus.

The October 1888 edition included a section titled “Our College Sports,” which described football’s growing popularity, especially the “various games of football,” like rugby. That edition also reported that Miami students under the instruction of two professors, Bridgeman and Parrott, were taking an interest in football.

Bridgeman and Parrott would later select the players for the first Miami football game against the University of Cincinnati two months later, as reported in a December 1888 edition.

Sports in general continued to grow in popularity at Miami, and it was grouped under the “Miscellany and Societies” section of the newspaper. At the turn of the century, The Student created its own athletics section, with S.T. Brandenberg serving as the first athletics editor in 1902.

Early coverage of Miami athletics consisted almost entirely of game recaps for football in the fall and baseball in the spring. Early in the 20th century, sports stories essentially cheerled the Miami athletic teams, reporting from a biased perspective that heavily favored Miami. Big victories often made the front page, such as Miami’s 45-0 defeat over Ohio University in October 1909. That story claimed that Ohio’s defeat was “easy” and that the Bobcats were “completely outclassed and proved no match at all for the Miami warriors.”

By the late 1910s, The Student had a dedicated athletics spread that covered football, baseball, cross country, basketball, intramural teams and athletic associations like Sigma Delta Psi, a national honorary athletic fraternity.

The Student continued the trend of cheerleading for Miami athletics and, for much of the 20th century, almost acted as a sponsor of the university. When the RedHawks won, reporters boasted about the team’s dominance over its foe and how it outperformed in every category. When they lost, the same reporters said that the team tried its best, yet still somehow lost against the odds.

The recap of the football team’s 55-0 loss to the University of Michigan in 1924 read, “the Red and White [were] hopelessly downed 55-0 … Disregarding the score, the second game proved, however, vastly more satisfying to Miami fans.”

This trend continued into the 1970s. Terence Moore, the first black reporter and editor at The Miami Student, said he had noticed a trend of undeserved support to that point that he wanted to change when he became Sports editor in 1977.

For example, sports reporters typically traveled with the teams they were covering. Moore ended that practice, and combined with several columns he wrote criticizing the athletic teams during his time, he was often at odds with then-athletic director Dick Shrider.

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“We used to run The Miami Student like a real newspaper, and lucky for us because it got us somewhere,” Moore said. “When we graduated, many of us went on to do not only good things, but tremendous things. We had that great experience with The Miami Student because we took it seriously. That was often to the chagrin of the higher-ups with Miami.”

During the 1970s, Miami was in what Moore called the golden era of athletics. The football team was 32-1-1 between 1972-74 and won three-straight Tangerine Bowls, and the basketball team enjoyed consistent success, defeating the reigning national champion Marquette University in March Madness in 1978. The athletic department also won the Reese Trophy — which was awarded to the top men’s all-sports program in the Mid-American Conference — eight times between 1970-80.

Because of the all-around success, Moore said he and his sports reporters were expected to buy into the celebrations and advertise the teams. Instead, he wrote objectively and criticized the team where needed, often receiving phone calls and notes on his door and being coined the “rabble rouser of The Miami Student” in the 1978 Recensio.

“At the end of my senior year, I wrote a column about how difficult it had been being a Sports editor [and] bringing journalistic ethics,” Moore said. “I even had fans that were upset with me. Students were upset with me. They didn’t think that my reporters and I were cheering enough for Miami. I had to explain to them that that’s not our job.”

The precedent set in the 1970s continued through the rest of the 20th century. The Sports section also continued a precedent set nearly 100 years earlier, as game coverage occupied most of the space.

Above all else, the sports reporters at The Student emphasized the importance of professionalism. Mike Gruss, the Sports editor in 1996, remembered an enforced dress code when he first started as the women’s basketball beat reporter.

“The Sports editors at the time were very serious that we were not going to be second-tier journalists,” Gruss said. “We were going to be treated as professionals. The rule was you had to wear a jacket and tie to every game. I lived in Anderson, the women’s basketball games were in Millett Hall, so it was like a mile walk. I would be in my blazer, and people were like, ‘Are you pledging?’ I was like, ‘No, I have a women’s basketball game.’”

Although The Student hadn’t reverted back to its overly-enthusiastic ways, Gruss said the Miami athletic department always treated him and the other reporters properly. He always had a seat in press row for basketball games and could interview the coaches and players one-on-one if needed.

Once he became Sports editor at the end of his freshman year, Gruss said he spent nearly all his time in the newsroom on the third floor (and later in the basement) of MacMillan Hall. While running the Sports section, he wanted his spreads to cover the big games for football and basketball, but he also wanted to highlight underreported teams as needed. If he had a football story on the Tuesday print edition, he wanted a field hockey story for the Friday one.

“We had something called the ‘Student Athlete,’” Gruss said. “This is someone who had a really great week that otherwise we might not write a story about. This woman ran a 4:45 mile. We’re not going to do a story on that, but it’s a good way for her to get her picture in the paper and for her or her team to get some recognition.”

While he was there, the Miami men’s basketball team embarked on a historic 1998-99 campaign with Wally Szcerbiak on the roster. That squad eventually reached the NCAA Sweet 16. Gruss, who became editor-in-chief in 1998, organized a special print edition for the occasion. The Sports section also had a special spread when the Recreation Center hosted an Olympic qualifier in 1996, marking the first time the Sports spread had color.

The RedHawks and the university gained national attention with Ben Roethlisberger playing quarterback in the early 2000s, as the football team finished the 2003 season 13-1 and ranked 10th in the final AP Poll. Drew Eastmead, who became Sports editor in 2002, said this, as well as the hockey team’s success, reinvigorated the support from students on campus that had mostly laid dormant since the 1970s.

“It’s not often, and I think people knew this, that Miami would be breaking the top 25 in really anything,” Eastmead said. “They had football and basketball at the same time, [and] the energy at the hockey games was amazing. I didn’t go to every football game, but I definitely went to the bigger ones, and people were pumped. We were confident — It was a great time.”

Eastmead started out as the designer for the Sports section before becoming Sports editor and later editor-in-chief. He also covered the men’s basketball beat and said his decision to attend Miami over a larger school enabled him to gain that exposure early.

Eastmead echoed the sentiment of the Sports editors before him and wanted to include all sports. The Sports section had also begun writing profiles on certain athletes and features on activities within the athletic department.

“A lot of it for sure was game coverage,” Eastmead said. “We wanted the newspaper to feel very up-to-date when we could, but obviously we were constrained by the whole Tuesday [and] Friday publishing … Maybe one of the issues each week, we would have some sort of feature story about either a player or something that was going on in the sport.”

During Eastmead’s time at Miami, The Student moved offices once again from MacMillan to Harris Hall. He also designed the first iteration of the website and helped the newspaper adopt a more digital approach.

While Miami’s football success fizzled out in the late 2000s, the men’s basketball and hockey teams rose to national relevance, with the latter reaching the Frozen Four in 2009 for the first time in program history.

The Student still focused on game coverage for the most part, with columns taking up notable space as well. In the late-2010s, however, the sports section became more interested in player profiles, in-depth features and investigative pieces. By 2020, those types of stories began to take up more space than game previews and recaps.

Chris Vinel took the helm of the Sports section from 2018 until he became editor-in-chief in 2020. During his time as Sports editor, Vinel saw a Miami athletic department resurgence. The football team won its first MAC championship in 14 years in 2019, while the field hockey team established itself as a formidable threat for years to come with a MAC championship and NCAA tournament appearance in 2020.

COVID-19 paved the way for a change in how Vinel ran the Sports section. Along with the newspaper as a whole, the section transitioned from two prints per week to two online prints, which eventually became the bi-weekly print schedule that The Student still uses. Vinel said writing for The Student provides the opportunity to make mistakes and embrace change.

"No one is going to remember a bad story or mistake in The Miami Student," Vinel said. "Use the time you have in The Student to make mistakes and learn from them."

As Vinel transitioned into the editor-in-chief position, he discovered how, amidst a pandemic, The Student was also a hub for students to build relationships. The Sports section consisted of no more than five consistent writers, but the section, as well as the whole newspaper, thrived on community.

"When I look back on my years with the newspaper, I think about the community that we had as a group," Vinel said. "I remember how awesome the people were, and how great it was to be in the newsroom all the time."

Vinel produced the most bylines by a Sports editor until current editor Kethan Babu overtook his count with 231.

Currently, the sports section runs meetings on Tuesdays in the newsroom, with bi-weekly prints and online stories going up throughout the week.

babukc2@miamioh.edu

younggm7@miamioh.edu