The idea for my story came to me when I was spending time at home visiting my brother after his torn ACL surgery. My brother is a professional Nordic combined athlete and I knew that with that connection I could get special access to his team of surgeons, coaches and teammates in order to write an in-depth story.

The biggest obstacles when writing my story was to keep it non-personal because I was writing about my brother. I really had to separate the way that I know he feels about his injury and stick to the facts and the interviews, challenging myself. When interviewing everyone it was easy to make sense of all the information into a story. They are all Stephen’s team of doctors and coaches and they all know the same story so all the information from the interviews was cohesive. The focus became on my brother’s recovery as an athlete and how it happens differently being a professional athlete and how it affects the athletes themselves.

The writing process was very straightforward there were clear guidelines to the assignment. The biggest struggle for me with writing is, I love to tell stories but putting them on paper with the correct grammar has always been hard for me. This process has taught me how to properly research and execute a story for publication and pushed me to learn AP style and better my writing. I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed the process of researching and writing this enterprise story and how much I learned.