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Entry 8

Overall Reflections on the Course and Internship

Sports Media at Holmesglen is the course I should have done straight out of highschool. If I had known about it during my VCE, I would have applied for it at the conclusion of Year 12. Anyway I’m super glad that I eventually stumbled across such a wonderful course, with wonderful lecturers. What’s fascinating about Sports Media is that it is so specific, yet simultaneously so broad. There are plenty of straight ‘Journalism’ or communications courses, however it’s rare to combine the two plus more.

My writing skills were reasonable but my passion for sport and the media was large. Working in a class of 15-25 people made it feel like school, which was good because the lecturer could tend to our needs and spend more time explaining things or assisting than compared to a lecture with 300 students that one may find at a Monash Uni mathematics lecture.

Having four very different streams, if you will, was helpful because the units weren’t confusable and we are enabled to focus on each on separately. The fact that the subjects taken in a given semester were not alike was also a positive in the way that it made things quite interesting; the fact that we were developing skills in multiple different areas at once.

After four weeks, we had to shift online due to the pandemic, which wasn’t ideal social or studying wise. It was hard to not socialise with new-found mates and it was also difficult to find motivation to study with a distracting setup at home.

As students we had to adapt and I did. The first semester results came out and I had received a Distinction in all four units, much to my delight. I knew this would be hard to maintain, but was thrilled to work through the challenges and still get promising results.

The next semester went by quickly and so did the first semester of second year. Second year introduced us students to more hands-on learning, particularly with filming videos and editing. This was quite fun but also tedious at times. The VAFA projects were a good experience as we got to teamup with a football club and complete various assignments relating to them. This was headline by a social media strategy and a sponsorship proposal. The whole VAFA experience was long and tiring one but it helped us develop our editing skills, thinking outside the box and creativity.

The last year at Holmesglen went fast to start with and the main focus was about applying for internships and sharpening up on most of what we learnt throughout the course.

My internship was with Outer East Football Netball, who have their headquarters in Kilsyth, conveniently around the corner from where I live.

My internship was heavily revolved around writing; reviews, previews and more reviews. The researching of games and stats of players I’ve never heard of was fun, as was attending three Saturdays worth of Grand Finals (both football and netball). After writing the reviews of these Grand Finals, I was tasked with writing reviews of each clubs season. This was a slightly daunting, yet exciting task. Calling up coaches was a new experience for me but it ended up becoming second nature. The internship was exceeded my expectations as I was able to have my say on every club and Grand Final. My dream job would be involve a similar role to the one I played at OEFN.

The internship was a massive hook for me to join the course and the juice was certainly worth the squeeze.

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 7

Reflection on Evaluations

Evaluations are an integral part of the internship, especially with regards to learning. They help identify strengths and whilst acknowledging areas of improvement. Henderson et al (2019) paints feedback as a tool to assist the learner with their decision making. Without feedback, it’s hard to know if one has done well or not, which would be troublesome and would lead to no growth.

I was thrilled with my 100 hour evaluation, as I received a solid mark of 4.2 out of 5 and it highlighted my ability to analyse results and convert that into written previews and reviews

My second evaluation saw me receive a slightly lower mark 15.2/20, which isn’t terrible. However, it signals that I slid a bit with the quality of my work.

This is understandable due to the more rushed timeline of the final stretch of hours. (The first 100 hours took longer).

I am slightly disappointed at the fact that I missed some details regarding players being league best & fairests and the spelling errors.

Despite these errors, I believe I performed strongly throughout the internship and both the 100 and 200 hour evaluations attest to that.

The overall mark out of 25 for the internship evaluations is pretty much what I was expecting (19.4/25).

Between the two evaluations, it seems that my quality of writing and research was at a strong level, as was my communication and eagerness. Given that writing and research weren’t mentioned in the second evaluation as my main strengths, it’s possible that this is indicating a slight drop off in these areas. However, I was satisfied with the ‘quality of work’ being marked as “very good”.

This feedback both gives me confidence in my writing and sports journalistic ability, as well as points me toward focusing on the detail. Some careless errors are what cost me from receiving a better score. This is something I can fix and am keen to fix.

Overall I believe I was marked fairly and was given detailed feedback highlighting my strengths and my weaknesses. The internship has helped to set me up for a launch at the job market in the sports media landscape and the feedback, provided following the internship, should help me iron out the creases.

First Evaluation 

 Second Evaluation 

References: Michael Henderson, Michael Phillips, Tracii Ryan, David Boud, Phillip Dawson, ElizabethMolloy & Paige Mahoney (2019) Conditions that enable effective feedback, Higher Education Research & Development, 38:7, 1401-1416, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2019.1657807

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 6

Career Aspirations

Heading into the Sports Media Degree, I wasn’t 100% sure on what exactly it was that I wanted to do. The Sports Media industry was the definite area I wanted to pursue, I just wasn’t sure if that would be commentary, journalism, video editing or something completely different. Now I’m at the very end of the course and I am still very open to all of aforementioned possibilities. Commentary appeals to me as I love the idea of calling sport live and applying your own unique twang to it. My player identification in the AFL is elite and the internship at OEFN has quickly developed my skills to attribute names to numbers & faces at a fast rate.

My video editing skills prior to the course were completely non-existent, whilst my writing skills weren’t bad. Both through certain assessments and the internship, my writing capacity and skills have broadened and strengthened, due to writing many previews and reviews, across multiple sports.

Masterclass 2011

Looking to the near future, I look to continue applying for jobs, but at an increased rate. I have applied for a couple here and there, whilst I’ve been busy with the internship and work. However now I need to focus more on applying jobs I want and a wider range of jobs.

My job search might be more fruitful following the appointment with Holmesglen jobs and skills serives. Ella was fantastic in pointing out how to strengthen my resume and some handy tips on how to word things to balance confidence with non-cockiness. Which was something I asked her about, given I tend to find it hard to talk myself up. Something I learnt through the course regarding importance of items in resumes changing was echoed by Ross & Young (2005), pointing out that the importance and presentation of certain information your resume should change depending what job you are applying for.

Hopefully I can land a job as a writer or digital content creator at a sporting club/organisation in the next 6-12 months. If not, I will keep applying for jobs and keep growing my skills, both sideways and upwards. A goal of mine is to develop a website which incorporates videos, articles, games and quizzes and run it myself and hopefully run it alongside friends when the website becomes bigger. This would be a multi-sport, multi-faceted website. Sports would likely range from Australian Rules Football to cricket, to netball, to hockey.

Late great Ed Sheerer - AP News

As mentioned, whether I am successful in my job hunt in 2023 or not, I will look to expand my skills in all areas, through Youtube tutorials or seeking further advice from professionals.

Further down the track, I aspire to become an ‘expert’ with respect to AFL, cricket, netball or any other major sport. I understand this will take a lot of time and hard work, but I am willing to do what it takes.

Sports Media has very much developed and broadened my skills, grown my confidence in these areas and as a person and helped me realise what I want my career to look like.

References:

Ross, C. M., & Young, S. J. (2005). Resume preferences: Is it really “business as usual”?. Journal of Career Development, 32(2), 153-164.

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 5

Achievements & Milestones

The first few weeks of the internship went by quickly. It comprised of a lot of writing, watching football and netball live in person, and more writing. Before I knew it, I was easily past 50 hours upon the conclusion of the season. Being approximately a quarter of the way through in the internship in such little time was a great feeling. However, I was well aware that the season was now over and that the pace of the internship was about to slow right down.

For OEFN, it was important to keep players, fans and the public etc. updated and engaged throughout the off season. As with most, if not all team sports, there is a review following the season, mentioning the results, positives, negatives, injuries, new recruits etc.

Writing post-season reviews was something I was looking forward to with both excitement and nerves. Exciting because I would get to learn more about each club both stats-wise and story-wise. And nerve-wracking because I wasn’t very familiar with constantly calling people I didn’t know/have never met before. The 100 hours came around quickly, after a hand full of team post-season reviews, which had me feeling both happy with reaching the almost halfway mark of the internship and becoming confident with calling up coaches, to the point where it really was starting to become second nature.

The 200 hour mark arrived early December, just before OEFN were due to go on break. It was excellent timing as it aligned with when I had finished all the club post season reviews.

Completing all 27 reviews was an achievement in itself as it took me well over 100 hours to complete. This was heavily comprised of time researching teams, players and ladders, plus contacting coaches, secretaries and presidents. After securing phone interviews with coaches, it also took a while to decide which quotes were the most relevant and appropriate, before transcribing them, making them ready to be incorporated into the reviews.

Although there were milestones a long the way during the internship, completing the internship and thus, Sports Media, is a milestone in my life. The last three years, although made difficult due to the pandemic, have been the most fruitful of my life so far. Coming to an end in this course, caps off a period where I got my driver’s license, moved out of home and am now the best equipped for ‘the real world’ as I ever have been.

Completing a bachelor degree is an achievement and it means a lot to me, especially seeing I didn’t complete my first course (Science at Monash University).

Looking into the future I have to keep pushing on and improving my skills. I can’t afford to stagnate and be happy with where I am without continually looking to improve.

Dreamstime 2020

This picture demonstrates one peak climbed, but more to come, representing the completion of the course for me, but the larger mountains in the distance or larger achievments like landing solid jobs in the media industry etc.

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 4

Challenges I faced

Despite how fun this internship has been, it’s had its challenges. None of which I wasn’t able to overcome. My main challenges that I came into the internship thinking about was the logistics of it all. That is to say that I was wondering how I’d fit enough time to complete my internship, whilst undertaking two subjects in addition to this and still working enough on the side to pay my rent, bills and other living expenses etc.

Thankfully I have been able to do a lot of my work from home, or even at one of my workplaces (on the odd occasion). This has allowed me to not drop my work hours down but not my an extreme amount. Apart from the hours where I was attending finals and being in the office, I was able to break my tasks into pieces where I could tackle some of it before work and some after.

Another main challenge was one I thought could potentially pose a threat to the quality of my work. This was that I didn’t know a whole lot about netball. I knew all the positions and rules but I’d barely watched netball before the internship.

It was my belief that I would therefore struggle early days to write solid match previews and reports.

Thankfully it’s a simple game to pick up on and know what to write about. Choosing what to write about, apart from the obvious, was simply what stood out to be, whether it was defensive pressure or clean passing, momentum swings etc.

Another major challenge I faced when writing both previews for netball finals and netball reviews (for each club) was that not all the matches had teams player positions available. The players who participated where always listed, however the positions where not always visible. In certain cases this meant I had to carefully scour each match and see which matches had positions listed. It didn’t stop there as some players who rotated positions throughout the year and I had to make educated guesses or mention the numerous rolls they played for that team.

This was a challenge I embraced and came through the other side of.

One last major challenge I can think of is when doing the post-season reviews for each club, there were coaches who either weren’t replying to my texts/emails and some that took quite a while. Thankfully my main supervisor told me that some clubs may have already changed coaches and other clubs might not be willing to speak. This allowed me to get on with it and write reviews to the best of my ability & knowledge based on the stats that I were able to access both through the gameday website and more detailed stats through Premierdata, which I was given the password and username for.

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 3

Becoming an Effective Team Member

My internship supervisors have been fantastic with telling exactly what I need to do and when by. This is very important because it means I can get done what needs to be done, in a timely manner. Whenever I’ve been unsure on particular details on certain tasks, I’ve always received a definitive and timely answer up on asking said question.

After the previews and reviews of the Grand Finals, I asked my main supervisor what he thought of them and he said he was happy with the work I was producing. Although I wasn’t anxious about the writing I was doing, It was very helpful to be told that it was of good quality.

Seeking feedback was important because as much as the internship is about me furthering my skills and gaining experience, it just as much about maintaining the reputation of OEFN and not letting them down.

During the internship the vast majority of my hours were completed remotely. This isn’t that I couldn’t go in most days but that I’d go in every now and then to touch base, although I’d send emails most day either updating my internship supervisors on how far through the certain work I was, or emailing through the completed work itself.

Whilst not at the headquarters in person, I’d contact my main supervisor surrounding when I’d come into the office and when I’d have certain things completed by and any necessary clarification.

Hischfield et al (2006, p. 467) sums up perfectly the importance of teamwork,    “Team members' mastery of designated teamwork knowledge predicts better team task proficiency.”                                                                                          Here Hischfield et al (2006) has told us why teamwork is important, now Driskell et al (2006, p. 249) explains what makes someone a good team player “Good team players are often defined in trait terms; that is, they are described as dependable, flexible, or cooperative.”

At OEFN it is a team, I’m the intern and what I do is sent to and edited by (when necessary) my supervisors. My role is an important one, as is theirs. Aswell the maintaining a strong image of the organisation, it’s important my tasks are completed to the best of ability and that I’m producing work that they’re pleased with. This is a big part of the reason why I maintained regular contact with my supervisors and asked for feedback.

My belief is that I have been a strong ‘team player’, as I showed flexibility through completing reviews at home, at work and sometimes even whilst on public transport. Cooperation is something I certainly showed and I’d like to think I was reasonably dependable.

  References:

Driskell, J. E., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & O'Shea, P. G. (2006). What makes a good team player? Personality and team effectiveness. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 10(4), 249.

Hirschfeld, R. R., Jordan, M. H., Feild, H. S., Giles, W. F., & Armenakis, A. A. (2006). Becoming team players: Team members' mastery of teamwork knowledge as a predictor of team task proficiency and observed teamwork effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(2), 467–474

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 2

Finding My Feet- Completing initial tasks

As my first entry touched on, I found it quite easy to fit into the culture at OEFN and the initial task I completed was a tiring but enjoyable one.

This was paired with the task of attending said matches at Healesville on the Sunday and then writing reviews on each game. The football match previews and reviews were more in-depth than the netball matches netball games are shorter in length and have 11 less people on the court as football has on the field. In addition to this, possessions aren’t recorded in Netball (atleast not this level), like they are in football.

I drove down to Healesville, arriving around 8am, catching the 17&U game first, followed C Grade Netball. A few of the netball and football games clashed, occurring simultaneously, so I positioned myself in strategic places where I could witness most of the action of the two sorts at the same time.

This wasn’t simple, and I had to keep on the move at times, which was an enjoyable challenge.

By the time the second half of the reserves Grand Final, the Netball had been completed, so I could focus more easily, as it was just football now. I went into the commentary box and listened out for names and I got a copy the teams sheets. This certainly aided the recording of the finer details for my post-game reviews. The goals and score are there for anyone to see, however I was glad to be able to add my own view on the matches that went beyond the obvious. This is skill that is very important. Getting the basics right is a must but being more detailed and thorough than the basics is just as vital.

Live in Commentary Van at Healesville 5th September 2022 - J Peeler

I helped with some of the packing up, mainly picking and rolling astro-turf mats that had been placed around the football oval and netball courts, before returning home.

That night I spent an writing the senior and reserves football matches reviews before writing the netball reviews across the following two nights (from home).

Altogether this didn’t take too long, just a few hours all up and I easily sent this through via email by the deadline.

Writing previews was fun, watching the players in action and now putting faces to the names was even more enjoyable. The writing of the post match reviews were reasonably simple because of the notes I was taking almost constantly throughout the Sunday at Healesville.

It took roughly three weeks to reach the 40 hour milestone and so far it’s been quite enjoyable. The Premier Division Grand Finals were a fortnight after the Division 2 ones, which game me ample opportunity to prefer and write the previews for them.

It was a day of horrendous thunderstorms, hail and lovely sunshine that the crowd down in Gembrook were treated to, not too unfamiliar to Melbournians. The A Grade Netball Grand Final was an absolute belter and I’m not talking about the rain, as it was bucketing down late in the game. It was a game that saw momentum swings and both teams looked like running away with the match at times. It went to extra time where Olinda Ferny Creek won by just 1 goal! They were the underdogs and pulled the win off against an absolute powerhouse of a club in Narre Warren.

The senior football final saw Narre Warren win after flipping the script against Woori Yallock , after trailing for most of the game.

Not to mention the game was delayed by 75 minutes due to the thunderstorms and used my macpac puffer jacket to cover the generator for the commentary/PA system at the Netball, to stop the rain damaging it.

This was a day to remember for the aforementioned reasons and one I’ll cherish and tell my future kids and perhaps grandkids about.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the internship and what it holds in store.

[jpsportsinternship]

Entry 1

Assimilaton and Preparedness

The main emotion surrounding the anticipation of an internship was eagerness & excitement. The opportunity to complete an internship in the Sports Media landscape was a massive drawing point to this course for me.

Any internship would be a fantastic experience to learn more about the industry, whilst gaining experience and potentially putting my foot in the door. I applied for seven or eight internship partners, this included a wide variety; internship partners based in sport I didn’t know much about or have much passion for and partners based in sports that I know and love.

After having a brief interview a few weeks prior, I’ve been taken on by Outer East Football Netball, a football/netball league which, as it states, is in the East and is not close the CBD. Their headquarters are on Colchester Rd in Kilsyth which is handy as it’s an eight minute drive from my house. Two people who commentate there are people I’m friends with through Holmeslgen.

After hearing back from a few internship partners, that they hadn’t selected me, I was slightly disappointed but was still excited and hopeful about the prospect that I could land an internship with Outer East Football Netball.

Being a massive football person, this was a great fit for. It was also a great fit for me because I love writing and I love analysing things, being a highly analytical person myself.

My first day (31st of August) was exciting, I arrived at 10am and was sat in a room at a desk, after being introduced to all the staff there who very warm & welcoming, where I’d start my first task; writing Grand Final previews for both football and netball.

It was the Division 2 Grand Finals, played out at Healesville. My previews were of the following; football- u19s, Reserves and Seniors, netball- A Grade, B Grade, C Grade, D Grade and 17&U.

This took me all day, from 10 until 5:30pm with a 30 minute lunch break. I was quite tired from all that typing and writing (notes in my book with pen) but I was happy what I had managed to achieve.

Researching players statistics, past matchups (between the competing teams), leading goal scorers and possession getters etc was quite fun and something I do as a hobby anyway (with AFL stats).

The feeling the in air at the Outer East Football Netball headquarters was one of vibrance and positivity. Asking questions and sharing a laugh was something that could be done easily and there was no awkwardness to speak of. This was helpful in me settling in at Outer East because I am quite a bubbly outgoing person.

Not just for me, an intern, but the for all involved, it’s highly important that the workplace environment is healthy. This may seem obvious, whilst academic literature affirms this notion. According to Theorell et al (2015) poorly functioning work environments can lead to depressive symptoms.

Forbes magazine goes further, “assimilation is not only desirable, but also necessary for the success of the organization.  In many companies, assimilation to some degree or another is also necessary for the success of the organization.”

For my first day, my excitement was satisfied with the writing of reviews and it’s my belief that I fit in well into the work environment.

 Reference: Theorell et al. BMC Public Health (2015) 15:738