About Producer

I am currently a Journalism and Bilingual Journalism M.A. student at the University of Arizona. I graduated from Arizona with my B.A. in Journalism and Communication with a Minor in Public relations in May 2022. I transferred to Arizona back in 2019 after graduating with an Associates in Arts degree from Pueblo Community College. During my time as an Undergraduate and Graduate student, I have conducted numerous work for the Sports desk at the Daily Wildcat in which I covered a variety of teams such as the Arizona Women's Soccer team, baseball, football, volleyball, and basketball teams respectively. Furthermore, I reported on several stories for UATV which includes the Chinese Lantern Festival at Reid Park Zoo and Ansel Adam's Birthday Celebration at the Center for Creative Photography. In addition, I underwent several apprenticeships with the Arizona Daily Star in which I wrote feature stories for both the Arts & Life and Sports desks respectively. Moreover, I conducted an internship with KVOA News 4 in Tucson, AZ in which I learned and gained experience in news reporting, anchoring, production, and writing.

During my time as a student at the University of Arizona, I have been very fortunate and humbled to have been the recipient for the 2023 NBCU Academy Scholarship, 2020 Rocky Mountain Emmy Scholarship, and 2020 Society of Professional Journalists Scholarship. In the future, I have aspirations to work in sports broadcasting as a play-by-play announcer as my long term goal is to conduct play-by-play announcing for the European Champions League and FIFA World Cup.

Research Process

In this section I will elaborate on the methodological approach to my M.A. project. To help me better understand the variables that influence the disinterest and/or interest in soccer in the U.S, I embarked in the project by conducting interviews with a diverse range of sources. The sources I interviewed include academic scholars, sports reporters that currently or covered soccer in the past and college soccer coaches. I interviewed these sources in particular because I knew they would be able to provide me strong insights and other information that would help me answer my hypothesis due to their extensive knowledge and background in soccer. Not only did I receive perspectives from experts and coaches, but the perspectives from fans, spectators, and non fans were of interest for this project as well.

The way I was able to get in touch with the college soccer coaches that I interviewed for my project was through accessing hundreds of college sports department directories. To make it easier on myself, instead of randomly typing in the first college that came to my mind, I accessed lists of all the college conferences in the U.S from an ESPN website. This allowed me to go through each college directory page with ease. The directories were my best source for getting in contact with the coaches because it provided their contact information and it was fairly easy to get in touch. I reached out to them via email to figure out times and days that fit our schedules. I was grateful that I was able to get a handful of coaches that provided me their time and consideration to be interviewed. Furthermore, I even called several coaches through the numbers that were provided in the directories as well. My interviews with coaches were conducted either through Zoom or phone.

In terms of getting in contact with the sports reporters that interviewed, I was able to get a hold of several of them through twitter. They also provided me with their time and consideration to be interviewed. After interviewing several of the sports reporters and even coaches, they provided me with more contact sources that I could reach out to who would be interested in being interviewed for my topic as well. As a result, this led to a snowball effect in which I continued to ask sources after interviews concluded for sources who would be interested in being interviewed. Moreover, I was able to access a directory page that included several soccer reporters based in the U.S. This made it easier for me to get in touch with them, instead of waiting for a response from them on Twitter.

I was interested not only to explore the opinion of experts and reporters, but also of fans and soccer audiences. Therefore I decided to interview game attendees. For my “man on the street interviews,” there were days where I would go around the University of Arizona campus and interview anyone I could find. I felt it would be intriguing to receive insights from students that attend a university that is not known for soccer. I conducted my interviews with students in several buildings such as the food court at the Student Union Memorial Center and the main library. At the food court, I decided to go when it was peak dinner time, knowing that I had plenty of options to interview. I was fortunate enough to conduct several interviews with students sitting at tables and having meals. These were 3-5 minute interviews as I didn’t want to take too much of their time. I conducted these interviews in-person of course and used a recording app on my phone to record the interviews. I then proceeded to make my way to the main library which I felt was an ideal place to conduct interviews because most people will be stationary and by themselves. I approached a lot of students in the library from the first to the fourth floor and was fortunate enough to be able to interview half of the people I had approached. I used my phone as well to record these interviews. To supplement my campus interviews and add in more diverse perspectives on my topic, I attended several University of Arizona Women’s Soccer games to receive input from fans. I worked my way across the stands and interviewed several spectators from each game with my phone as well. In addition, I took photos of players in action, referees, and anything I found suitable for my website.

The research findings for my project consist of scholarly articles that I found on google scholar and the University of Arizona library catalog. Each source provided exceptional and relevant articles that really touched on my topic and gave an array of perspectives. The articles that I accessed were written by accredited academic scholars. These articles gave me directory pages that listed the contact information of each scholar. I took advantage of this and emailed each scholar. I was fortunate as half of the scholars got back to me. I conducted my interviews with them either through Zoom or over the phone.