The Fellows: Andrew Tie

Let’s Get It Started

I like sports. No, I love sports. I remember as a child, our VHS lineup included the 1993 NCAA championship game between North Carolina and Michigan, right next to the Lion King and Swiss Family Robinson.

Since then, my love of sports has only grown. Basketball, baseball, football, hockey, soccer, tennis – you name it. Me actually playing the sports? I tried, but that didn’t work out for one reason or another (primarily a lack of a skill), but watching and understanding competition always intrigued me.

The summer before college, I started to look at potential majors. I found the journalism school at UNC, and it clicked. I wasn’t that good at writing, but I could work on it. Learning to write about sports felt like the most amazing job in the world. I have no regrets at all.

Of course, anyone interested in sports writing mainly for the sports aspect probably won’t make it. But I found a perfect match in my interest in writing along with my interest in sports. It’s so fun to tell stories in sports. There are so many fascinating coaches and athletes and so much randomness in competition.

I’m looking forward to continuing to write about sports here as a Dat Winning fellow. I don’t write a lot about Asian-Americans in sports, mostly because there are so few Asian-American varsity athletes at UNC, but that’s an area I’m excited to explore in the next year. I hope to improve my writing, produce great features with strong reporting and expand myself to overlap sports with Asian-American topics.

To wrap up my intro, I leave you with this video from the ’93 title game, one of my first memories of what sports is all about. Here is Chris Webber, calling the timeout he didn’t have, but I’m too busy still wondering how the refs didn’t call a travel.

ANDREW TIE | @Andrew_Tie

Andrew Tie is a senior journalism major at UNC-Chapel Hill.