Day 2

Today I had a very successful interview with Georgia State University Associate Athletic Director Doug Justice. I conducted the interview at the GSU Athletics offices downtown. I talked with Mr. Justice about many different areas of athletics, but stayed focused on football. I tried to tie in financials with most of the questions I ask, but some of the questions were more based on the non-monetary acts of running a program like gaining fans and a good reputation. We talked about how playing on a big stage can gain notoriety for your school, and how playing in "guarantee games" can help and hurt your program. On the topic of gaining notoriety we talked a little about GSU's recent basketball win against Baylor, and what that meant to the school which was interesting. Overall, our interview was about 40-45 minutes long as we covered a wide range of topics. This first interview was encouraging because I walked away from it knowing I would have plenty to write about for my first article. my next task transcribing the whole interview which will take a while, and then starting to layout the article. I have two class periods at the end of the day tomorrow to work on this, so hopefully I will get a lot done. I also need to get in touch will Kennesaw State and Tennessee to set up interviews, as well as possibly Berry College who is a small division three school who probably runs there program fairly differently than the division one school that I am talking to. I hope to start reading a little bit of the book "The System" as well tomorrow, which is one of my project objectives.

Day 1

Today I did not have the two periods that I dropped for my project, but with my first interview tomorrow, I still had a meeting with Mr. Randolph to discuss idea and potential interview questions. Because colleges will probably not mention specific financial figures in their answers to my questions, I have to figure out a way to form my questions so that they don't have to do that and I can still get my question answered. Mr. Randolph suggested to me that I look at how a school getting national media attention in something like March Madness, can have implications on their admissions pool. Some of my other questions revolve round how having a football team affects a schools reputation and image, along with questions specific to each school. Georgia State for example, will be ask about their stadium, along with some questions about "guarantee games." I have also contacted a journalist who covers Georgia State and Kennesaw State football about weighing in on my project from an outside perspective, which he agreed to do. Tomorrow's interview should be interesting.

Pre-Project

Blogger is how I will keep everyone updated with my progress on this project. My project will be kicked off this week with an interview Tuesday from Georgia State University Associate Athletic Director Doug Justice.