Meet the 2019 Award Winners: Connecticut Sportswriter Dave Borges
12.16.2020
Today’s award spotlight is on NSMA 2019 Connecticut Sportswriter of the Year, David Borges. Borges is the University of Connecticut’s men's basketball beat writer for Hearst Connecticut Media. He has been a writer on the team since 2007. Prior to his current position, he covered the Boston Red Sox, writing for the Journal Register Co.’s New England Cluster, as well as having covered the Providence College men's basketball team. He is also the author of the book Rebound!
This is Borges’ first time winning Connecticut Sportswriter of the Year!
Borges briefly spoke with NSMA on his career and other thoughts regarding the industry.
NSMA: What was your career path like on the way to your current position?
David Borges: Got a job at my local weekly as a sports writer directly after graduating from the University of Rhode Island in 1992. Four years later, I was hired as a news/sports writer at the Pawtucket Times, for whom I had done an internship while in college. Covered prep sports, and later the Pawtucket Red Sox and Providence College men's basketball. In 2004, the company started a new traveling Boston Red Sox beat writer position for the 10-12 papers around southern New England, and I got the job. When the company sold its southeastern Mass./Rhode Island papers in 2007, I transferred over to the company's biggest paper, the New Haven Register. Later that year, I took over as the Register's UConn men's basketball beat writer. The company was bought by Hearst a few years ago, and I now cover UConn MBB for about 8-10 different Hearst-owned papers in Connecticut.
NSMA: What is your favorite thing about your job?
DB: I absolutely love being a beat writer, trying to consistently come up with interesting stories and different angles that competitors aren't thinking of. I love writing features, telling stories about people that, if done right, can become a sort of mini-biography about someone that can be referenced by others for years to come. I love the feeling of breaking a story. Doesn't even have to be a huge story, just providing information to people that no other writer has. I love the buzz of being courtside at a big game, and even the adrenaline of banging out a story on deadline when it's just you and your fellow beat writers in a suddenly quiet press room, immersed in your work until beating the clock by minutes or seconds.
NSMA: What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?
DB: I began covering the Red Sox in 2004 -- a pretty good year to start. Being able to chronicle that historic season, traveling to nearly every road game and, of course, being there at Yankee Stadium for the ALCS comeback and at Busch Stadium for the World Series title was amazing -- especially for someone who grew up loving the Red Sox. The season was such a blur, however, I wish I had had a one-year head start and maybe begun the prior season. I've covered UConn in three Final Fours and watched them win two national championships (2011, 2014) -- both of them unexpected. I covered the six-overtime UConn-Syracuse game at the Big East tournament in 2009. Ultimately, it's the great games that I've covered that are the biggest highlights, though in all honesty, winning the NSMA Connecticut Sportswriter of the Year award is right up there.
NSMA: What is the best piece of advice you have for people pursuing a career in sports media?
DB: Write what other people aren't writing, but don't force it. If there's really only one story to write off of something, don't try to reinvent the wheel. Try to break stories, but let them come naturally. Don't go around looking for scoops around every corner. With good reporting, they'll come. One other thing I've tried to do in recent years is writing as well as I can, but not flowery. Connect to the average reader, don't try to write a great work of literature with every story. It's really all about telling a story in a way that people are going to want to read, not using as many S.A.T. words as possible and trying to win a Pulitzer with every story.
Written by NSMA intern, Brian Cohen