A Day in the Life: The UNO Alumna on the Sidelines of the Men’s College World Series

8:00 AM – Good Morning

“I basically check all of our socials just to make sure we’re caught up,” says Avarie Howard about starting her day.

Howard, a Maverick from the class of 2022, is a reporter and senior social strategist for Hurrdat Sports. The locally-grown digital media outlet has become the largest source for all things Nebraska sports; covering high school, collegiate, and professional level athletes, teams and games.

“I’ve always loved sports. I’ve always been enamored with it,” Howard says.

She’s one of those in charge of gathering and pushing out sports content, information, and stories onto social media platforms to their thousands of followers and deciding how it’s presented.

“Is it worth, you know, [sharing] the interview clip, or is it something that can be a multi graphic swipe that explains the whole story?” she says.

Howard is quite literally on the sidelines of every major Nebraska sporting event, including at the mecca of college baseball: the Men’s College World Series, during which her long days become even longer.

Even before a morning coffee, the first task of the day is ensuring there’s nothing they missed or didn’t capitalize on from the day(s) before.

11:25 AM – Clocking In

Howard officially ‘clocks in’ for work at the infamous Baseball Village outside Charles Schwab Field in downtown Omaha. A Hurrdat Sports tent greets fans passing by, has a TV hook-up with sports talk shows playing, and a media backdrop with a table, two chairs, and a camera set up directly in front of it.

For 30 minutes, Howard and her colleague live-stream a podcast on all Hurrdat Sports platforms and talk all-things MCWS; the upcoming day’s games, team dynamics, top players, statistics, special player and family stories, and more.

After watching every single post-season game, meticulous notetaking, team research, and being part of the MCWS media day, allowing her and her team to meet the players and coaches before the tournament, Howard could fill much more than 30 minutes of time.

"It's really enjoyable, and it's a fun time to call this work,” she says.

12:22 PM – Pre-game Ritual

Credentials in hand, Howard walks into the media entrance of Charles Schwab, and navigates the internal halls of the stadium with familiarity. She grabs the gameday lineup sheets, claims her seat in the media room, then walks straight to the ‘media well,’ the small space dedicated to reporters, photographers and videographers directly next to the first baseline dugout.

“I like to go down by the field, usually immediately, just to kind of see what both teams are doing,” she says. “I enjoy seeing the vibes pregame of both teams, especially if it's an elimination game. I just find it fascinating how the players and teams and coaches handle themselves.”

As a digital journalist, Howard knows there is a lot to learn, and a lot to share, through simple observation.

“You get to see the small things, like you get to see the coach's sons out there, or the way that the teams interact with one another,” she says of witnessing the pregame warmups.

Growing up, she recalls watching ESPN reporter Laura Rutledge at the College World Series.

“She would only pop on the screen here and there, you know, to do a report, and I loved her job, but I just thought, like, maybe this is something she'd done on the side. I didn't get it, I didn't understand it. I was like, okay, that's cool, now what does she go do?”

“I never really knew you could make this a career path.”

That is, of course, until she arrived at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) campus in 2018.

1:08 PM – First Pitch

Howard watches the first pitch of the West Virginia vs. Troy elimination match from the media well. Most reporters, however, watch from the third-level press box.

“I like to hear what players and coaches are saying and offering. It’s fascinating to feel like I can sit inside their minds a little bit,” she says.

Her journey from watching the games on TV to watching them from next to the dugout began with a simple radio class at UNO, even though she was enrolled as an education major her freshman year.

“It was really like, oh, you’re in this radio class, we're going to challenge you to be on radio, but if you guys want to call games, there's this opportunity...” she explains. “It was like, okay, I've never done this before. What am I supposed to know? It's all just like kind of learning by fire a little bit.”

A life-long sports fan and college athlete herself (playing in 68 games over her 4-year career as a UNO women’s soccer player), she quickly realized this was her path into the sports media world. Eventually she changed her major to Journalism and Media Communications.

“We had professors that were encouraging us to try new things,” she says. "They weren't limiting in what we could do. It was like, you want to try it, okay? Here you go, here's an opportunity.”

During Howard’s time at UNO, JMC 4420, a sports writing course, was added, taught by Andrew Stem in the College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media.

"So to have that opportunity, like my sophomore year, when I was terrible and didn't know anything, but to have real-life reps, that's all this industry is, is getting repetition. So to start that at a young age, it's been such a blessing to have people at UNO that just want to see you succeed and [they] give you the opportunity to.”

3:14 PM – Wheels are Turning

After watching innings 2-5 from the TV in the post-game press conference room, Howard steps back to the media well to catch another feel of the game, just in time for the first home run of the day.

That run began what would be a slugfest for West Virginia. That’s also when the internal wheels start turning for Howard, thinking about post-game coverage and interviews, and knowing what she would be asking players and coaches on the field after the game.

While that is a now-common task for her, she remembers the first time she ever had the opportunity to do it, during her time working for MavRadio.

“I got to interview three or four players that year, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. Looking back on it, it's probably, like, disastrous, but such an important experience for me,” she says with a laugh.

“We got a lot of real-world experience in college that I don't know a lot of other students get,” she adds.

4:50 PM - The Scramble

After a runaway 12-0 win for West Virginia, the post-game scramble begins. Howard, microphone in hand and videographers in tow, heads to the field and begins connecting with players and coaches.

These interactions are now second nature for her. Along with working for MavRadio, she was a rink-side reporter for the Omaha hockey team. Through those experiences and lots of repetition, she’s learned what questions to ask to help capture raw emotion and gather game insight.

Post-game is also Howard and her team’s opportunity to, again, simply observe. When they’re not conducting interviews, they’re the eyes for what isn’t seen once the TV game broadcast ends.

“We are videotaping the fan base's interaction, we're watching the players and their families interact, we're watching whatever small little thing they're doing, if they have a tradition or whatever it may be, and then getting that up on social," she says. “Other pieces of our social team have been waiting at the busses, or they're sitting here at the press conference.”

She and her team take those interviews, every minute detail, and turn it into digestible, attractive, quick hits for social media audiences, garnering attention from thousands, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of viewers.

But in the earlier days of the MCWS tournament, speed and timeliness are even more important. That’s because there’s another game.

“So we kind of wrap up the full game coverage to the best of our ability in a timely manner before the next game, and then the next game starts, and we kind of do it all over again.”

And yes, Howard stays for that second game.

6:30 PM - Game 2 First Pitch

“I'm so lucky to even be standing on this dirt, and so I really never take that for granted ever, like, this entire event,” she says.

“I'm not gonna miss a game; why would I not enjoy the front row seat that I get to be a part of here?”

Through her drive, persistence, and admitted slight obsession with sports, Howard knows deep down that somehow, some way, she would have ended up where she is today.

But she says it was UNO that gave her the solid foundation of knowledge and inaugural experiences to speed up the timeline.

“I don't know if I would believe it if I'd be doing [this] as early in my career as I am,” she says when asked if she ever imagined herself sitting in Charles Schwab, covering the Men’s College World Series.

“The fact that, like, this is the way that I'm getting to do it for a digital media company that's still here locally, and it's not just written, or it's not just news, like, there are so many different avenues now, it's been really cool.”