Writing Portfolio
Sports Reporting
This is writing from a Sports Reporting course I took in 2022, where i picked a few short stories on it.
CSU Cycling Race Returns to CSU Campus
ForOn a cloudy weekend in early April, over 600 bike riders lined up across multiple disciplines to take part in the Colorado State University (CSU) Cobb Lake Road Race Oval Criterium.
The event, which hasn’t been hosted on CSU’s campus since 2019 due to the Covid 19 pandemic, was called “a very successful event” by the organizers. It took place on April 2nd and 3rd in and around Fort Collins. The races held on April 2nd were held on roads around Cobb Lake on a course that was about 8 miles long and featured 250 ft of elevation change. The races held on April 3rd were on a course that was a little over 1 kilometer long around the CSU Tennis Center.
The races near Cobb Lake were in a road race format, which is based on time needed to complete a certain distance. The distances needed by category ranged from 28 miles and 3.5 laps around the course to 68 miles and 8.5 laps for the top classes. However, the races near CSU’s campus were in a criterium style, which is based on who can complete the most laps around a typically short course in a certain time limit. The time limit ranged from 25 minutes to an hour based on a rider’s skill level.
There were 11 categories in the criterium, including a 1 lap kids race, and 12 categories in the road race. There were five classes of collegiate racers in both race, which included several racers from CSU. Other schools that were represented included Colorado Mesa University, the University of Colorado, and even some racers from Montana State University who travelled over 10 hours overnight to race.
This race is important to the CSU Cycling Club because it is the main fundraiser for the club in a given year. However, most registration costs do not go to the team, but instead the volunteer hours worked by members at the event translates to money that the team receives. As such, the event is “vital to the team” and “helps the team pay for housing and transportation” for other events in the year, including some mountain bike races up at some ski resorts in the fall.
The criterium is usually held on the main oval on CSU’s campus near the administrative building, however was not able to be held there this year due to a lack of necessary permits. It was not held the previous two years due to the pandemic, but the organizers decided to give it a go anyways, with the cases on CSU’s campus and across the US and Colorado declining over the past year.
CSU students performed quite well across the weekend, with some students getting on the podium in their respective classes. Ethan Hobbs got a win in the Collegiate Men’s C category by less than half a second, according to the official race results. The race that Hobbs won took over an hour and 15 minutes, and was decided by the slimmest of margins. In the Collegiate Men’s A category, CSU student Lucas Huesman finished third according the official race results, finishing 18 seconds behind the winner of the category, Kieran Haug of the University of Colorado. Haug finished in almost an two and a half hours to secure the victory, with the gap between the podium and the rest of the field being over four minutes.
2024 Update - For this one, we had to create of story on anything we wanted to.
Tonight, at the Wukesong Arena in Beijing, China; the US women’s hockey team looks to take on the Canadian women in the 2022 Olympics final to decide the gold medal in women’s hockey at these Olympics.
Team Canada has cruised through the tournament, going 4-0 in preliminary games with an average margin of victory of 7 goals, including a 4-2 win over the US earlier on. In the playoff rounds, Canada has scored more than 10 goals in both the semifinals and the quarterfinals against Switzerland and Sweden respectively.
Team USA has not been as dominant, although they went 3-1 in preliminary games with their only loss being to Canada. In the quarterfinals and semifinals, the US won 4-1 against both the Czech Republic and Finland to make it to the finals.
The US and Canadian teams are familiar with this gold medal game against one another, as they have faced each other 5 times in previous Olympic women’s hockey finals, with Canada winning 3 and the US winning 2 including the most recent Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018. It is expected to be close, with the previous 2 Olympic finals, in 2014 and 2018, going to overtime and the 2018 game ended in a shootout.
“It’s one of the best rivalries in sports,” US defender Cayla Barnes told Yahoo Sports about the upcoming game.
Both sides are powerhouses in women’s hockey, and the game is tonight starting at 9:10 pm MST, which is 12:10 pm in Beijing. Not many fans will be in attendance due to Covid-19 policies at these games, with all games so far in the tournament having less than 1,000 fans in attendance.
2024 Update - This was for a story we did on an event we found and wrote about.
TThe Colorado State University Cycling Club is a club that competes against other schools in the sports of mountain biking, road cycling, BMX racing, and track cycling. The two most popular sports in the club are mountain biking and road cycling, with most mountain biking races taking place in the fall and most road cycling races take place in the fall. The club also participates in other disciplines, like cyclocross and BMX racing, but not regularly and they aren’t as popular. The club does not have an official coach, however instead CSU has a number of officials running the club, such as a President, Vice President, and captains of each different discipline. The club competes against other schools as part of the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Cycling Conference, which is one of eleven conferences made up of collegiate cycling teams from all over the country. The conference that CSU is in also has mostly schools from Colorado represented, as well as Wyoming.
CSU is a club team, as opposed to a varsity team, so they are in a different division according to USA Cycling than schools such as Fort Lewis and Colorado Mesa, who sponsor their teams directly through the universities athletic department. Any student can join the club and be able to race, with racers of similar ability levels competing against one another according to the status of their racing license, which comes from USA Cycling and is usually discounted for collegiate racers. The clubs focus is racing, but they also organize group rides for any level and many members of the club also work at a Fort Collins bike shop.e
History
In the late 1970s, the club was formed as the Spring Creek Velo Club, but was initially not focused on racing. Once the club’s headquarters were relocated to the bike shop, now known as Recycled Cycles, at the Lory Student Center, the team was renamed to the Rocky Mountain Cyclists. In the mid-1980s, the team began to focus on racing, although since mountain biking was pretty new in the 1980s, I would presume that they did not race mountain bikes officially until then. In the 1990s, things continued on pretty much like they did in previous years, but the governing body of cycling races in the US, now known as USA Cycling, started to introduce national championships for road cycling and track cycling. In the late 1990s or early 2000s, the club started racing against other schools in mountain biking, including at the yearly national championships. Nowadays, the club aims to send a team of athletes to the national championships every year.
Three best athletes
Many athletes have represented CSU at the USA Cycling Collegiate National Championships over the years, and some of them even went on to have professional careers as well. The best athletes from this club are hard to calculate, since the two main disciplines, mountain biking and road cycling, are very different from one another. Also, rankings and results for the US Collegiate National Championships are kind of hard to find, so here’s multiple athletes from CSU that have competed well at the national level for CSU in the last 4 years. The first one is Ross Soriano, who competed at the mountain biking national championships in 2018, 2019, and 2021. He finished in the top 3 in every national championship, with a best result of second in the dual slalom competition in 2021. The second one is Chaz Hogenauer, who competed in the 2018 and 2019 road national championships. He finished third in the road race in both years, as well as helping CSU to a third-place finish in the 2019 Team Time Trial event. The final athlete from this club that I would like to highlight is Christian Atkins, who competed in the 2018 and 2019 mountain biking national championships. He won two events in 2018, in the first dual slalom and downhill events of the weekend, and also placed second in several others, including the second dual slalom and downhill events in 2018 as well as the only dual slalom and downhill events in 2019.
On the women’s side, the club has not had the best of results, however they have sent multiple athletes to the national championships. Several have claimed top-10 finishes in events on either the mountain biking or road cycling events, with a best result that I could find was Melanie Beale finished second, with a time that was less than a second behind the winner, in the criterium at the 2018 road national championships.
Rival
The rivals of this team are the University of Colorado (CU) and the Colorado School of Mines, since those two schools usually compete with CSU for the best university cycling club in the nation. With the exception of this school year and last school year, CSU and CU have both been in the top 6 in USA Cycling’s Club Team Rankings every year since 2016-17. CSU has been at the top once, in 2018-19, whereas CU has been at the top twice, in 2019-20 and 2016-17. When CSU was the best in 2018-19, CU was in second place with a decent gap to third-placed Vermont. And when CU was the best in 2019-20, CSU and Vermont were in second place and third place respectively. CSU, CU, and Colorado School of Mines are all in the same division, as they are club teams. Other schools, such as Fort Lewis and Colorado Mesa, have varsity cycling teams that are actually affiliated with the universities’ athletic departments. However, at singular events like local mountain bike and road races, both categories of schools compete against one another. However, on the race track, whether it be mountain or road, athletes from both schools hope for the best from the other athletes, especially in downhill mountain bike events where bone-breaking crashes are more common.
Events hosted by club
The club also hosts some events in the local area as well, with the CSU Oval Criterium being held since 1986. The event has grown to include a road race as well as a criterium, which is a timed race usually held over a short course, and usually take about an hour or less to complete. The event is a main fundraiser for the club, since the club is not an official varsity team for the University and thus does not receive much money from the CSU Athletics Department. Usually, hundreds of local and collegiate cyclists gather on CSU’s campus to bike around the Oval near the administrative buildings every year. However, in 2020 and 2021 the event was cancelled due to the pandemic, and in 2022 was held near the CSU Tennis Complex. On the mountain biking side, even though CSU is close to several mountain biking trails around the Horsetooth Reservoir, the club hasn’t hosted a proper mountain bike race in several years. However, club officials are looking to change that, and are looking to host a race at a “nearby” mountain this upcoming fall.
2024 Update - This was supposed to be about a club or varsity team i support.