In the spring of 2006, I was finishing up my freshman year at Mizzou, and trying to find an internship for the spring. I was too young for jobs at a big paper — they were looking for a junior or senior who they could hire soon. So I tried two different avenues: One was to apply to smaller papers back home in Washington, D.C.; the other was to try to convince an organization that didn’t have a media presence to let me create one for them.
There’s a college all-star baseball league in the D.C. area, with a team about 15 minutes from where I grew up. I shot their general manager a note, and asked if they wanted someone to “cover” the team for the summer. I’d write game stories and longer features on the team, and cut together video that we’d put on YouTube. It was a low-risk kind of ask. I wasn’t looking for housing, or even to get paid. They didn’t have anyone who did that kind of work already, so anything I contributed would be a bonus for them.
The team said yes — but so did a paper in D.C., and they were offering the chance to cover a handful of teams, including the Washington Nationals. I took the job at the paper.
But here’s a story from The Ringer about Dan D’Uva, who actually followed through on the idea of creating his own summer internship program on Cape Cod, in their famed college baseball all-star league:
In 2002, D’Uva and his New Jersey high school classmate Guy Benson came to the Cape and told the Chatham brain trust they wanted to be the team’s announcers. No team in the league had announcers. But D’Uva and Benson had an unusual sense of purpose. “They were like laser beams,” Bob Sherman, the A’s vice president, said.
D’Uva and Benson called games featuring Evan Longoria, Andrew Miller, and Todd Frazier. When D’Uva graduated from college and began his long climb through the minor leagues, he volunteered to run the Chatham internship program…. When former Chatham interns started getting jobs at MLB Network and Colbert and with various minor league teams, word got around the broadcasting factories of Syracuse and Arizona State that the Chatham job was the one to score.
D’Uva’s now the voice of the Vegas Golden Knights hockey team — logging thousands of hours on air during his high school and college years surely helped — and the broadcasting program he started in 2002 is one of the most desirable broadcasting internships in sports.
This is exactly the kind of thing an ambitious college — or high school! — student could try. Maybe there’s a minor league baseball team near you that could use a photographer to run their Instagram, or a museum in your hometown that would love to start a podcast series. Maybe you could do something part time — just a few hours on a weekend — and combine that with a summer job to help pay the bills. Be ambitious and pitch the internship you want. You might end up building something that could be great for your future career.