Jimmy Kelley
Sports Editor
Springfield College was always going to be a part of my life. Saying it was destiny may seem like an exaggeration, but between my father — a member of the class of 1978 — and my love for the sport that was born here, the four years I have spent here have felt increasingly less like an accident.
I wanted to be a Physical Education teacher. I wanted to be an athlete. I wanted to be the guy on the front page of the newspaper with everyone paying attention to the hard work I had been putting in since I was a child.
One meeting changed all that.
I went from being the subject of the stories to the one writing them. I was still on the front page of the newspaper, but in a much more understated way and while this wasn’t the plan, it’s hard to imagine any way I could be any happier.
I wasn’t aware of the Communications/Sports Journalism program until one of my English professors told me to walk upstairs in Weiser Hall and meet with Marty Dobrow about the possibility of changing majors – something I had already been considering. In 20 minutes, Dobrow sold me on the program and after a week of figuring things out with my parents and my advisor, Mike Cerasuolo, I was joining the COSJ major and heading down a road that felt familiar even if I hadn’t been there before.
The first story I wrote for The Student was about the new exercise bicycles at the gym that allowed you to race against people across the globe. Not the most exciting stuff, but it was the grunt work I knew I had to do before getting to do the stuff I wanted to do.
What I wanted to do is what I’ve done this year: leave my mark on The Student and build on the foundation that was laid during my junior year by a forward-thinking group of seniors.
That mark is the beautiful new look of our website that showcases the work done by our talented staff of student writers and the content we have produced between our weekly issues. The online news cycle is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week and now, so is The Student.
None of that would have been possible if I’d never had that 20 minute meeting in the spring of my freshman year. None of that would have been possible if I hadn’t taken my lumps writing about exercise bikes.
None of that would have been possible if I hadn’t come to Springfield College.
And with that, I close my final column as the Sports and Online Editor of The Student. I’d like to thank the coaches, particularly Coach Bugbee and Coach DeLong, for putting up with all of my emails, calls and questions over the last year or so. I’d like to thank the players who took the time to share their stories with me when they easily could have blown me off.
I’d like to thank everyone who I’ve had the privilege of sharing the pages of The Student with over the years. If it wasn’t for the staff, the paper would be a four-page pamphlet with little substance. So many of them are sophomores and freshmen and I envy everyone who gets to read them going forward.
I’d like to thank Marty for sticking up for me when I got myself in some trouble. For vouching for me in my searches for internships and, now, full-time jobs. Without you I’m not sure what I’d be doing, but I’m sure I would be much less happy.
But most of all I’d like to thank Gabby, Alison, Terrence, and Joe. The 12-hour Wednesday night paste-ups, high-volume arguments about stories and blaming Joe Brown for everything, even if he made all our lives 100 percent easier are memories that will stick with me for a long, long time.
A legacy is the impact you leave when you are no longer where you were. With that in mind, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for The Student. It’s in great hands.
Jimmy Kelley
can be reached at
nothing because he is done with the newspaper forever.