St. Bonaventure University has roughly 2600 students in total enrollment. Radio Row, the main hub for media congregation at this year's Super Bowl in New Orleans, has over 6000 credentialed media members.
However, the moment isn’t too big for two Bonaventure sports media majors, who are looking to make the most out of their trip to the Big Easy.
This year, St. Bonaventure University sent six students from the Jandoli School of Communication to cover this year's Superbowl featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles.
The scene so far has been a sprawling assembly of media coverage, which has been exhilarating for Senior Isaac Howson, who feels standing next to household broadcast names like ESPN, FOX, CBS, and TNT validates his choice to pursue journalism.
“It makes me feel like it reaffirms what I've been doing. I don't think that I'm at that level of something like that (ESPN), but just to know that the work I've been putting in has gotten me to this point, and now, in a weird way, I can almost say that we're sort of colleagues. We're working in the same space. We might not be working for the same companies, but we're all doing the same thing. It just reaffirms that I think I'm where I'm supposed to be,” Howson said.
Kameron Melendez is another St. Bonaventure Senior traveling to New Orleans. He says his goal is to use his experience at Radio Row to better cover local sports in Western New York.
“When I was in high school, I noticed that there were a lot of kids in our area that weren't getting recruited except for smaller schools, which I thought they would go to bigger schools, just because of how much talent and work they put in, and that wasn't the case,” Melendez said. “That's honestly why I got into it. I was trying to help my community out, I feel like we have a lot of talent around the area that doesn't get looked at, and they all worry about the down south area, and we want to bring that to light.”
This is Melendez’s first trip with St. Bonaventure to cover the Superbowl, while it’s Howson’s 2nd time around after he covered last year's Superbowl in Las Vegas. Howson says the highlight of the trip for him has been building on the opportunities that St. Bonaventure has given him to develop in the sports media landscape.
“To work in the sports industry, you need to be doing multiple different things. You need to be getting in the ground early and putting your head down and just doing a whole multitude of things, that's what St. Bonaventure has allowed me to do,” Howson said. “I work at the radio station here, I can call broadcasts for ESPN, I can write articles for multiple different news sites at the school. This has allowed me to do so many different things that I think the school has really prepared me for, and it's just crazy to think that somewhere like St. Bonaventure could take you all the way here, it's amazing. I can't thank the school enough.”
Melendez is from Jamestown, so the highlight of the trip for him was when he got the chance to ask Nick Sirianni, Head Coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, who is from Jamestown, about what it means to represent the city at Superbowl LIX.
A transcription of Kameron’s question to Nick Sirianni:
Melendez: Kam Melendez, Jamestown. Being from Jamestown, what does it-
Sirianni: You're from Jamestown? My man.
Melendez: Being from Jamestown, what does it mean for you to represent the city on this big of a stage?
Sirianni: I think being able to come from a town in Western New York and grow up and be in this position, hopefully, that gives hope to people in Jamestown, they can accomplish their goals. I would say they accomplish their goals by working your butt off. You can't ever have an off day, and then embrace adversity, because you're going to have ups and downs through it. So yeah, I’m proud of where I came from, and the family that I grew up in in Jamestown helped develop me into the person I am today.
So, while Radio Row might be over two times the size of St. Bonaventure's student population, these sports media majors won’t blink at the chance to pursue their goals.
