Streaking the Lawn’s looking for new contributors!

Streaking the Lawn is looking to add some new volunteer contributors to the team! If you have a burning passion for the Hoos, some free time, and a need to tell the internet everything, boy do we have a role for you here.

We have openings for a few different types of writers, so no matter what your fancy, we’d love to hear from you. Underlying all of them, successful contributors:

• Have a passion for the Virginia Cavaliers and are already familiar with Streaking the Lawn;
• Are able to produce and edit clean copy;
• Are able to work independently including being able to generate article ideas and research statistics or relevant background information as necessary;
• Will commit to a story or a deadline and be able to meet it with enough time for copy editing;
• Preferably have previous sports writing experience; and
• Preferably have some daytime availability.

Note: these positions do not receive media credentials with UVA. If that’s your primary driver for applying, we encourage you to look elsewhere. In time, you may earn one, but that’s not guaranteed, promised, or expected. Also note that these are unpaid positions!

If you’re still interested, we’re looking for the following types of volunteer contributors:

Breaking News and/or Game Recaps

If you’re interested in this position, it probably means that you are great at strictly reporting.

If you’d like to focus on breaking news, we’re hoping you’ve got a good bit of daytime availability. Maybe a current student who’s not afraid to use their laptop in class for the greater good? (JUST KIDDING JIM RYAN, we’d never condone such behavior.) (But seriously.) Maybe someone who has a desk job and flexibility in how they work? (Not me, boss. I only work while at work.) News pieces are typically quick hits; sometimes we know when they’re coming out, sometimes life comes at us fast. For these pieces, we’re not looking for a 1,000 word article—that can come second. Instead, this is someone who can see the news come out, grab the relevant pieces of information, add a little bit of color or context, and hit publish pretty quickly.

If you’d like to focus on game recaps, we’re hoping that you tend to enjoy watching football and/or basketball games at home or in a low key setting with some friends...somewhere where you can have a laptop readily available because you’re probably jotting down notes throughout the game. While you’re watching, you’re able to identify trends, notable plays, and outstanding performances, and you can read a box score pretty quickly to find the information you need. By the final whistle, you are close to putting your finishing touches and you’re ready to hit that publish button to send a concise recap out into the internet world without typos or inaccuracies.

For both of these roles (which could be the same person!), you’re not committing to covering every piece of breaking news or recapping every single game, but we hope you’ll be available for a lot of them!

Opinion and Analysis

If you’re interested in this position, you probably have some hot takes (or lukewarm takes, or even just takes — that’s fine too!) that the internet absolutely must read.

For this position, you understand the X’s and O’s better than your average Joe or Jill. You watch games critically and can identify nuanced areas where the Hoos are crushing it, or areas where there’s room for improvement. You probably watch and read about a ton of sports elsewhere as well, so that when it comes time to scout UVA’s opponents, you already have a pretty good idea of the plays they run, their star players, and their weaknesses.

Here, you’re not publishing within 30 minutes after the game ends; instead, you’re probably taking some more time to review a couple plays again, take a deep dive into the box score, maybe even rewatch the game a couple times. You’ll probably take anywhere from a few hours to a couple days to put together your analyses and opinions.

Olympic Beat

If you’re interested in this position, you probably realize that not enough attention is given to Virginia’s other sports programs—you know, the ones that are consistently playing for national championships but that don’t generate the TV revenue to get the spotlight on them.

Maybe you’re a former athlete in one of these sports. Maybe you’ve just taken a liking to them. Maybe you actually don’t know the sport very well at all, but you are a quick study and want to follow and write about the team anyway. We’ve got room for you! For this position, we’re looking to make sure that in particular, we’ve got lacrosse and baseball covered in the spring and the soccer teams and field hockey in the fall. More is obviously great. But we’re trying to up our coverage in these areas.

It doesn’t mean you need to cover every single game with previews, recaps, and everything in between. But we do want our audiences to be pumped about the big games and the postseason, and we should be checking in with our heroes on a regular basis to make sure everyone knows how awesome they are.

Ready to Apply?

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