The Sports Reporters
by Jill Cousins
A career as a sportswriter was not on my radar when I arrived on the University of Florida campus in the fall of 1978. Although I loved playing sports, watching sports, and reading about sports, I never wrote for my school newspaper and wasn’t on the yearbook staff.
My college plan was to become a physical education teacher, but during a meeting with my guidance counselor, I was told to find another major. Apparently, there was a surplus of teachers at the time, and I wouldn’t be able to get a job after graduation.
So, for the next two years, I took a variety of classes, trying to settle on a new major. Then one day it hit me: I loved sports, I loved telling stories, and I hated the idea of doing a stereotypical female job. I also knew UF’s journalism school had just moved into a new building, and a typing test was required for admission (we used electric typewriters back in those days). Typing was one of my few talents, so I knew I was a shoo-in!
I started journalism school with the sole intention of becoming a newspaper sportswriter. As a kid growing up in South Florida, I had never seen a woman’s byline in the Miami Herald sports section, and the only female sportscasters on TV were former beauty queens Phyllis George and Jayne Kennedy. So, I had zero role models. But I loved the idea of pursuing a career that was dominated by men and proving that I knew just as much about sports as they did.
After taking Sports Reporting 101 during my junior year at UF, my instructor – who was also the editor of a weekly sports magazine called Gator Bait – asked if I’d like to work for him during my senior year, covering a wide variety of Gator sports teams. That was the first of more than a half-dozen publications that I would work for over the next few decades, including the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville and the Orlando Sentinel.
During those years, in the 1980s and ‘90s, I would write countless stories about high-school, college, and professional sports; get thrown out of several men’s locker rooms; and interview hundreds of athletes. I was blessed to have interviewed the likes of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Shaquille O’Neal in the NBA; tennis legends John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Andre Agassi, Martina Navratilova, and Steffi Graf; and Olympic champions like boxer Evander Holyfield, gymnast Mary Lou Retton, and diver Greg Louganis. While at the Sentinel, I wrote stories about high-school baseball players David Eckstein from Seminole High, Mark Bellhorn from Oviedo, and Jason Varitek from Lake Brantley... and they all went on to become World Series champions!
Among my very limited claims to fame: I was the first female sportswriter at the Jacksonville newspaper, I was one of the first women sportswriters allowed into the Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Falcons locker rooms, and I was the last bowling and tennis writer at the Sentinel. Now, writing for J Life magazine and its three sister publications in Seminole County, I have been lucky to continue writing stories about some amazing athletes here in Central Florida.
Even if I had no early role models as a female sportswriter, there were always plenty of Jewish role models out there, from legendary broadcasters Howard Cosell, Marv Albert, Al Michaels, and Len Berman, to sportswriters like Dick Schaap, Mitch Albom, and Shirley Povich (father of TV personality Maury Povich). When I was hired at the Sentinel, back in 1990, my prep sports editor Cheryl Gordon Kersky and renowned prep expert Bill Buchalter, z”l, were fellow members of the tribe.
The tradition of Jewish sports journalists continues in the Orlando area with, among others, the likes of Andrea and Eric Adelson, Austin David, and Philip Rossman-Reich, and these are their stories:
Andrea and Eric Adelson
It was the last week in December 1999, and Andrea Szulszteyn was at the Eden Roc hotel pool in Miami Beach surrounded by burly college football players, and she was starting to panic. As a young sportswriter for Fort Lauderdale’s Sun-Sentinel (now the South Florida Sun Sentinel), Andrea was supposed to write a story about the University of Alabama, which was in town for its 2000 Orange Bowl game against the University of Michigan. In her notebook, she had a list of questions and players she needed to interview. But she thought the players would be wearing their jerseys so she could easily identify them. Instead, they were all wearing polo shirts.
That’s when another sportswriter, Eric Adelson, decided to approach her.
“I started having a mild panic attack,” says Andrea, then a 23-year-old recent graduate of the University of Florida. “I don’t know what I’m doing or how I’m going to get my assignment done, and he came up to me by the pool and said, ‘Do you cover Alabama football?’ I couldn’t believe this guy was hitting on me while I was on deadline, trying to get my job done.”
Andrea tried to be nice about it, but Eric persisted. Finally, Andrea said, “I have to go.”
She left and thought she’d never see him again. But the two would run into each other at a team practice, and that’s when Eric asked Andrea for her email address.
“I just thought she was attractive, and I wanted to meet her,” says Eric, who was a sportswriter for ESPN The Magazine at the time. “But I wasn’t on deadline the way she was. I could schmooze. She didn’t have time to chitchat.”
Andrea did agree to give Eric her work email, and as she spelled out her unusual last name, Eric assumed he was getting punked.
“I thought she was giving me a fake name,” he says with a laugh, “because it’s a name I’d never heard before.”
That year’s Orange Bowl was a thriller with quarterback Tom Brady, in his last collegiate game, leading Michigan to a 35-34 overtime victory. But the real winners were Andrea and Eric.
“We struck up an email correspondence,” Andrea says, “and he was so sweet and nice.”
They would meet again three months later in Philadelphia during the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Final Four, and the sparks started flying. In 2002, Andrea quit her job and moved in with Eric in his New York City apartment, and they married the following year. While in New York, Andrea was hired by the Associated Press as a copy editor and eventually also covered the New York Jets as well as other big assignments like the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, and the 2005 World Track and Field Championships in Helsinki, Finland.
In 2006, Andrea was offered a job with the Orlando Sentinel as a general assignment sportswriter. She was eager to be a full-time writer again and thought Orlando would also be the perfect place to start a family. It was a little harder to convince Eric, a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Harvard graduate, who had moved to New York City in 1996 to attend the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
“That year [1996] was a transformational year for me,” says Eric, now 46. “That’s when I fell in love with journalism and fell in love with New York.”
“He loves New York, and I love New York,” says Andrea, 44, who was born in New York and moved to Miami when she was three years old. “But I had made a move for him, and now it was time for him to make a move for my job. We both still love New York, but everything just lined up for us with this job and what we wanted for our future family. And now it’s 15 years later, and we’re still here. And we love living here. It’s home.”
Daughters Hope and Anabelle were born in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Andrea would become a college football columnist at the Sentinel, and in 2010, she was hired by ESPN where she is now a senior writer for the sports network’s website, mostly covering the state of Florida and the Atlantic Coast Conference as well as doing some feature stories for its College GameDay football broadcasts. Eric is now a journalism professor at the University of Central Florida.
Eric is Andrea’s biggest fan and loves the fact that she knows even more about sports than he does. But that’s just a small part of it.
“It’s really hard to be a woman in sports journalism,” Eric says, “but she does it with guts and brains and with a spine and with a heart. She truly cares about the people she reports on and interviews. She’s also smart and funny and devoted to her family and the things and people that are important to her.”
For Andrea, covering college football for ESPN is the ultimate job.
“All of this has been amazing, and I am truly living out my dream,” Andrea says. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s so much fun. I get to talk about sports and get paid for it. It’s pretty cool.”
Austin David
Basketball was Austin David’s favorite sport during most of his childhood, and understandably so. His dad, Mal, was a basketball coach and played briefly overseas, and Austin was a tall kid, growing to 6 feet, 2 inches. But when Austin visited British mom Yvonne’s family in England, he couldn’t help but become fascinated by another sport.
“The soccer culture is so rampant over there,” says Austin, now 29. “No one in my family was too involved in soccer, but I was constantly visiting England, so it was ingrained in me very early on in my childhood.”
After his grandfather took him to a watch party for a big soccer game when he was about 12 years old, Austin was hooked.
“I got so invested in it emotionally,” Austin says. “I thought, wow, this is a really fun game, and I started playing it as a kid.”
Austin never imagined that his fascination with soccer would lead to a career, but that’s what happened. He currently works for Spectrum News 13 as a sports analyst and does soccer play-by-play for a variety of different streaming media outlets including ESPN, CBS, and Twitch, calling college, professional, and international soccer matches. During 2016-2018, Austin worked for the Orlando City Soccer Club doing some play-by-play for television and radio broadcasts and writing for the club’s website.
“That was when I decided this is something I wanted to pursue doing,” Austin says of his Orlando City job. “I was getting opportunities, and they didn’t stop inviting me back, so in my mind, I thought, ‘I guess I’m kind of good at this. So I might as well give it a try!’”
Austin’s introduction into broadcasting came by chance when he was working as a student manager for the Rollins College men’s basketball team. During his freshman year, in 2010, Austin noticed that most Rollins students didn’t seem to know what was going on with the Tars’ sports teams, so he asked the manager at the school’s radio station, WPRK, if he could do one-minute Rollins sports updates. That led to additional opportunities at the station including cohosting a radio show and doing color commentary for the Rollins soccer team.
“That’s how I got my start broadcasting soccer,” Austin says. “It wasn’t because I was interested in broadcasting – I just wanted people to come to our games, and it just kind of evolved from there.”
After graduating from Rollins in 2014, Austin ended up taking over as the play-by-play announcer for the Tars’ soccer games, which were live-streamed on the Rollins sports website. A chance meeting with Orlando City’s then play-by-play announcer Jeff Radcliffe led to Austin’s job with the professional club. But Austin was a casualty of budget cuts a few years later, and that’s when he contacted his friend – and fellow Lake Highland Preparatory School graduate – Philip Rossman-Reich (see his story above) and asked if Spectrum Sports could use a soccer analyst. Fortunately for Austin, the answer was yes.
“Being able to enjoy what I do, being excited to do it every week, that’s the biggest thing for me,” Austin says of his work. “It’s a little bit of everything; it’s definitely not boring.”
Philip Rossman-Reich
Philip Rossman-Reich’s basketball obsession started when he was a first grader at Lake Highland Prep. His parents would take him to Orlando Magic games during the 1994-1995 season, when stars Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway led the team to its first playoff appearance in franchise history.
“I just remember feeling this energy,” says Philip, now 33, “and the team was winning, so it was easy to get behind them.”
By the time he was in middle school, Philip had started trying his hand at sportswriting. He would watch ESPN’s SportsCenter and write his own recaps of what he had seen. He would then print out mock sports pages and distribute them to family members.
“I was always into basketball more than any other sport, but I was not the most athletic kid,” Philip says. “I knew I was a good writer, though, and that opened up a pathway for me to stay connected
to a game I knew I wasn’t going to play professionally.”
After graduating from the renowned journalism school at Northwestern University, where he wrote for the school’s Daily Northwestern newspaper and eventually became one of its sports editors, Philip decided to enroll in law school at the University of Florida in 2010.
“I really loved writing and definitely loved covering teams, but I fell a little bit out of love with journalism at that point,” says Philip, who previously had internships with the Birmingham News in Alabama, South Florida Sun Sentinel, and the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves while at Northwestern. But while working for a local law firm and doing some freelance sportswriting for the Orlando Sentinel, Philip realized how much he missed writing and being connected to the sports world.
“I eventually made the decision,” Philip says. “I realized that’s where I needed to be.”
While in college, Philip helped a friend write an Orlando Magic daily sports blog. When his friend moved on to a different job, Philip took the blog over. He also tried starting his own website, covering local sports in the Orlando area, with the goal of giving young writers a chance to get published.
While working on that, Philip was offered a job hosting the Locked on Magic podcast and then got a job with Spectrum News 13 as an associate producer on the news side, around 2016. About a year later, Philip was part of the group that started Spectrum Sports 360, a daily show that airs at 10:30 p.m. He is now one of the show’s producers, helping to create elements for the show and deciding what stories to air and the order in which they are broadcast.
With his blog, podcast, and TV jobs, Philip is in basketball and sports heaven.
“I feel a little bit spoiled by that, to be honest,” he says. “I’ve been able to find something I love and feel passionate about. I joke around that I get to watch sports for a living. I’m literally paid to watch a Magic game. I do feel really, really fortunate and blessed. To do that every day is something very special.”