Former editor says his farewell
Chris Dunham
Issue date: 4/27/09 Section: Sports
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Actually, I've never denied that fact. It's what I do, and what I plan to continue doing for a long time.
I came to school at SSU to pursue a sports writing career, and did so at a great time.
The most common question I've heard since taking over the Chronicle in 2007 has been "why do you cover sports so much?"
Yes, I am a sports writer, but the answer to this has nothing to do with my background. It's because I inherited a newspaper during a Golden Age for SSU athletics.
This year, four teams competed in national tournament action with three of those teams finishing with the best seasons in program history.
I traveled to Kenosha, Wis. with Eric Putnam's cross country teams and witnessed the Bears men and women both completing the best seasons in school history with top-15 finishes in the national race.
Because the cross country meet overlapped with the volleyball team's first ever national tournament appearance, I missed the opening round loss to Lewis-Clark State. But the Chronicle was there for the AMC Tournament on Nov. 15 where the Bears won a pair of games to clinch its first berth in the national tournament.
Winter rolled around and with it came the first undefeated regular season in the history of a storied women's basketball program. The team made its second-consecutive appearance in the NAIA National Tournament, falling to the eventual national runner-up.
Because of these unprecedented successes, the athletics at the university have earned all of the press they've gotten in my years as a staff writer and editor of the Chronicle.
While I intended all along to become a sports writer and work for a campus newspaper, I never expected to in the capacity I have for the last two years.
As a freshman, I enrolled in Terry Hapney's Intro to Mass Communications class to begin work on my journalism minor. Hapney and John Stegeman, who was a student in the class that wrote for the Chronicle and Portsmouth Daily Times, talked me into taking a journalism class that spring and pursuing a job with the Chronicle, though I was still very inexperienced.
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John Stegeman
posted 4/27/09 @ 9:54 PM EST
Chris has done more for the Chronicle and more for the journalism program's reputation than any editor that paper has had.
His contributions far outweighed mine and any mentorship I offered was only useful because of his pre-existing work ethic and talent. (Continued…)
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