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.