Thanks to the connection that Mr. Daquisto, a long-time Mission Educator, Mission High School’s third-period Journalism class had the privilege of meeting Ann Killion and asking her questions. Ms. Killion is a talented and passionate Sports Writer for the SF Chronicle, a daily newspaper for the San Francisco Bay Area.
She started with a background story of herself. She has always been a sports fan, and after graduating from UCLA with a communications and history major, she worked at a PR firm in downtown SF.
Little did she know that interviewing racers at the California Mile race, and seeing how sports writers loved their jobs, would spark her interest in becoming a sports journalist.
After studying at the Columbia University Journalism School, she got an internship with the LA Times and covered many famous sports teams in San Diego, California. After a year, she moved up here to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked for the San Jose Mercury News.
When the opportunity arose to cover a rising ice skating star, Krisita Yamaguchi, who was a high school student, Ann later was able to cover her at Nationals and then at the Paris Olympics.
“This sent me on a course that made me fall in love with Olympic sports”, she said. After that, Ann Kilion has been able to cover 13 Olympics over the years.
Later on, she was presented with the opportunity to be a columnist, she found that she took to it, and it was a good fit for her. Since the mid-’90s she has been a columnist, left the Mercury News in 2009, took a buyout, wrote a couple of books, did some freelancing, and then got a job at the SF Chronicle 12 years ago and has been there ever since.
“After getting into this business you stop being a sports fan… we don’t root for teams….but we do root for people. We root against our own headaches, we root for our own stories and we root for people. It’s been a super fun career and I think sports is one of the great things to write about.”
“It’s people, human beings, succeeding and failing in real-time.”
Here are some of the questions that students asked, and her answers:
Have you seen more women in sports journalism since you started?
“Oh yes, yes way more. When I started, it was still pretty rare. It’s gotten a lot better. There are a lot of women presenting. There are a lot of women in very prominent positions that everyone kind of sees, so we are accepted as being part of the world much more now.”
What are some of your favorite experiences that you have encountered as a Journalist?
“Some of it is Olympic oriented, for example like Simone Biles, watching her do things that you can’t imagine a body can do. Last summer, one of my favorite days of my career was the second to last day of the Olympic sports. I went to cover the women’s soccer team in Paris. After that 3 of my colleagues and I would run and get on the metro. We had to go all the way across the city to get to the basketball gold medal game. Rushing in, my colleague had told me that he had written Steph so much, so he asked me to write. Steph won the gold medal game with an amazing ending. It was so much fun.”
What do you do when something unexpected happens?
“Something unexpected always happens! You pivot, that’s what I love about the job, I go to work and I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
What advice would you give to aspiring journalists?
“Write as much as you can, read as much as you can. In terms of Journalism, my business changes every week. I would say to learn to do a bunch of things like podcasting, video, column writing, and game writing. Have a variety of skill sets, ask questions, don’t take things at face value, and be skeptical.”
Thanks to Ann Killion and her visit to Mission High School, aspiring journalists in the Journalism class have gotten another perspective on how to write, be bold, and be passionate about writing.
