Alum
Stephanie Kuzydym
Sports enterprise and investigative reporter, The Louisville Courier Journal
Stephanie Kuzydym, BAJ'12, reported for the Safer Sidelines project, investigating sudden athlete death in high school sports.
“When I was little, I wrote a book for a class assignment. It was about a whale and a seahorse and how they both lived in the ocean, but they saw and could do things differently. It all came off this fortune cookie I got at a Mexican restaurant of all places that said, ‘the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.’ I fell in love with it (writing). I liked the way it made people feel. And then I learned that you could actually do this thing called writing. I learned that I loved telling people’s stories.
Indiana (University) became my learning lab, and the biggest portion of that learning lab is the IDS. I became the journalist I am today because of the IDS, because of what I got to learn and experience. You learn journalism by talking to people and by failing and by writing a headline nobody likes.
I think every single thing I’ve experienced today, I could probably point back to something that I’ve experienced at IU, at the IDS. There is not a thing here (IU) that I didn’t soak up and take with me.
(Safer Sidelines) was something that started here on campus. I was in Tom French’s storytelling class fall of my senior year, and there was a story that got put down in front of me called, ‘The Boy Who died of Football’ by Tom Lake, in Sports Illustrated.
It was about a Louisville High School football player who collapsed, and I kept being like, ‘man, this is crazy. I’ve reported a lot on sports, and I’ve never heard of something like this.’ And it just so happened that within the next year, a kid named Jake West from my high school would collapse on the sideline. I kept being like, ‘if it happened in my hometown, and it happened in Louisville, who others’ hometown is it happening in?’
What you're about to do as a journalist is report on the world. What IU gave me was a small slice of the whole world. I got to meet people from all sorts of countries and learn about the challenges they had when they came here.
‘You don’t know what you don’t know’ has become my reporting motto with sources. Showing up with empathy, hearing and not just listening, setting aside the ego that you do have, and recognizing that if that person was unwilling to talk to you, there’s a lot of things you wouldn’t be able to report on or say. Also, everybody you meet is a potential source.”
Written By McKenna Cardona
Photos By Emma Ramirez