However, what I did want to do with this post was to take a look back ten years and see where I was at that stage in my media career and compare that to now.
In January 2010, I was living with my parents, working part-time as a personal trainer. I had a goal to have a career in media, but no concrete plan at that time on how to achieve it.
I was writing a sports and pop culture posts five times a week for a blog I created that no longer exists. I didn't get paid to write it, but I enjoyed doing it and it showed that I had the creativity and drive to do it for a living (I just needed someone to give me money to do so).
It was also at the beginning of 2010 that I completed the first draft of my baseball novel. It took another two years to get it published by a small publishing company in Eastern Ontario.
(That company is now out of business--surely the publication of my novel is unrelated!)
The steps and career check marks I hit from that point in 2010 to now, here on the first day of 2020, were incremental. I was the furthest thing from an overnight success.
Case in point:
2011 - Played semi-pro baseball for the London Majors. Then worked as a freelance sports reporter and columnist for the Metro News London.
2012 - Named editor and sports reporter of two community newspapers: The K-W Review and the Guelph Review (now defunct. I swear it wasn't my fault!)
2013 - Worked at The Weather Network as an on-camera presenter and field reporter.
2014 - Hired by CrossFit Media to be a sideline reporter for their regional fitness competitions. Presented the weather on CBC’s The National, CBC Toronto and CBC News Network.
2015 - Worked as a sideline reporter for ESPN at the Reebok CrossFit Games. Hired at Global TV as a weather anchor.
2016 - Worked as a fill-in sports anchor for Global News and fill-in co-host of The Morning Show on Global.
2017 - Worked as a sports reporter for Global News, producing, editing and writing various sports stories. Sideline reporter for CBS Sports Network for Reebok CrossFit Games.
2018 - Joined Tennis Canada and created a monthly video and article blog for globalnews.ca called Second Serve: An Inside Look at Canadian Tennis (Interviewed Bianca Andreescu, Daniel Nestor, Vasek Pospisil and Denis Shapovalov). Individual competition sideline reporter for CBS main network coverage of the CrossFit Games.
2019 - Produced, hosted and wrote What’s Your Fitness Age and The Culture of Fitness series , covered the Rogers Cup for Global News and did sports radio segments on Global News Radio 640.
It has been a long, arduous process to get where I am today and there were many times when I didn't think things were going to work out, but I kept persevering.
Looking ahead, I am already creating and producing more content for Global in early 2020. One is a series called Fitness Served Cold and the other is a competition series called Top Dog.
Happy New Year!
