One of the first things I learned working in professional sports was surprisingly simple: Athletes are just people.

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That sounds obvious but sports have a way of making it easy to forget.

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We turn athletes into statistics, storylines, personalities and content. We talk about access as if getting a camera closer automatically makes the story better.

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I don't think it does.

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I was 18 when I first started regularly working around professional athletes. At first, there was something intimidating about it. These were the people fans watched from the stands and media members interviewed after games, their stories were now mine to help tell.

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Then you spend enough time around them. You see someone tired after a bad game. You learn who is quiet before competition and who talks to everyone. You see people dealing with pressure, injuries, families, expectations and everything else that continues happening when the uniform comes off.

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The distance disappears pretty quickly and that's where athlete storytelling starts.

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Before asking someone to tell you something meaningful, you should probably understand the person you're asking. Trust changes what people are willing to give you. An athlete who believes you're going to treat their story with care can give you something completely different from someone who feels like the camera appeared because the content calendar needed another post.

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That doesn't mean every athlete feature needs to reveal something deeply personal. Sometimes respecting the person means understanding what they don't want to share. Sometimes it means knowing when someone wants to joke around instead of becoming the subject of an inspirational story. Sometimes the interesting thing about an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with the sport they play.

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The goal shouldn't be to make every athlete appear more emotional, vulnerable or relatable, it should be to make them recognizable as themselves. That's why I think athlete storytelling begins before the interview. It starts in all the interactions where nobody is recording. How you treat someone when you don't need anything from them matters.

 

Whether you listen matters.

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Whether they trust you matters.

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Because access can put a camera in the room but trust is what might give you a story worth telling.