Dom Amore fell in love with sports long before he did sports writing, but it didn’t happen right away. When the other kids played tag and football in the schoolyard, Amore would just stand by the side and watch. His father, who gave his mother the day off one day and picked him up instead, saw this and asked why he wasn’t playing with the other boys. When Amore said that he just didn’t really like football, his father was as shocked as he was disappointed, but had an idea. He went on to take his son to several football games just to see if he would like it, and that was all it took.

“I just started following it all, watching everything that I could: all the golf tournaments, the pro bowler stories, roller sports, and of course, the Yankees. And that was it, I was hooked,” Amore said.

By the time he got to high school, Amore already knew he wanted to be a sportswriter. To climb the ranks in any industry, though, takes a lot more work than any aspiring student would expect. Sports journalism is no exception. Amore started at the bottom, working as an intern with shore line newspapers and covering high school and local stories weekly. He went on to work for other small publications like The Milford Citizen, but he still wanted to push his career further.

“I knew that if I didn’t push the envelope, to try to get to a bigger paper, they weren’t gonna be coming after me,” Amore said. “So, I started moonlighting at the [Hartford] Courant… they decided to expand their high school coverage, and they hired nine minors to cover [them]… I finally had a foot in the door.” That passion for sports, paired with sharp journalistic insight, allowed Amore to climb throughout his writing career.

Except the industry changed a lot since he became a sports journalist in the 1980s. Many people couldn’t attend games back then, and collegiate games weren’t necessarily televised either. However, it’s never been easier for sports fans to connect with each another than it is now. People don’t need a TV to watch sports games anymore, they can just use their phones instead. Social media is as much a platform for fans to voice their thoughts as it is a way for them to talk with athletes and teams.

With how interconnected the sports community is now, it’s changed how journalists approach reporting. Information is immediate, and the demand is at a faster pace than print. Social media is used as extensions of their articles. Stories can be a collection of curated social media posts instead of a fully developed piece of writing. And yet, despite how reporting has changed, Amore evolves with journalism just as he always has.

“A lot of people write everything on [social media,] but then it begs the question: why read the story at all? So I try to keep in mind that I don’t work for Twitter; Twitter works for me, and I work for the Courant. So, I’m gonna use it as a tool,” Amore said.

Whether it’s long-tern coverage or column writing, Amore limits how much he tweets on sports games. He prefers to keep the whole narrative tucked behind his articles rather than out on social media. Amore sinks his faith into the storytelling aspect of sports journalism, and spoke to sports writing students at WestConn how leaning into that is the trick to stand out from the crowd.

“You’ll find that people will stay up all night watching a game and know everything that happened, but they still wanna relive it the next morning,” Amore said. “The trick is… not just giving a recap, not just writing a play-by-play, but to find a different angle; to tell the story of a game that is a little different from the other stuff that comes out.”

Journalism is viewed as an exclusively objective outlet; one for facts and nothing else. However, behind every athlete is the story of how they got there. And watching every player, coach, and team pave their own path in real time is why people share countless memories over again. It’s these memories that lay the foundation for the future of not only sports journalism, but sports as a whole. So long as writers like Amore keep the art of journalistic storytelling alive, then that passion for sports will always burn bright, too.

“You not only have to be willing to adapt to whatever you’re doing, but you have to love the profession, you have to love storytelling. Then you can get psyched up for what you want to do… You just have to evolve with it,” Amore said.