By Phil Kaplan
Danielle Allentuck’s alarm clock goes off at 5:15 a.m. three days a week in her room at Ithaca College. It’s to ensure she makes it in time for her part-time job as a lifeguard starting at 6 a.m.
She was on her “second cup of coffee” and “wide awake” when class would start at 8 a.m.
“I’m a very organized person,” said Allentuck, a senior who is spending the summer as an intern at The Buffalo News. “I plan out everything. I’ve always been good about getting my homework assignments way in advance.”
Julia Poe, who will be a senior at Southern Cal, says she uses her Apple calendar to plan every hour of every day. It was extremely important during her time as sports editor of the student paper last fall as the Trojans were playing football and she tackled 20-plus hours a week at a work study and a freelance position with Pro Soccer USA.
“I have managed my time a lot more than I think other students I know,” said Poe, who is spending the summer as an intern with Sports Illustrated in New York.
It was timely moves by Allentuck and Poe, two of the four winners of the Associated Press Sports Editors college scholarships.
Allentuck is awarded the Roy Hewitt Scholarship and Poe will receive the Joe Sullivan Scholarship, named in June after the longtime sports editor of The Boston Globe, who retired in July.
The two other winners were Jackson Frank of Gonzaga, awarded the Tim Wheatley Memorial Scholarship; and Alec Lewis of Missouri, awarded the Jack Berninger Scholarship. APSE gives four scholarships of $1,500 to collegiate sports journalists. The scholarships are awarded based on the quality of the journalism, academic record and need. The scholarship was established in 2007 by then-APSE president Mike Fannin. All four winners will also be given APSE student memberships.
At The Ithacan, Allentuck’s rise was meteoric her freshman year, joining the school paper her first day on campus, promoted to assistant sports editor in December and sports editor in March.
“I just got lucky,” said Allentuck, who also has done internships at USA Today and NBC Olympics. “I applied after my first semester and nobody else applied. They didn’t have really many options, which was good for me. I showed them I could do the job.”
Allentuck is now columnist and senior writer. She also appears on student radio during halftime of football games along with sports updates. The resident of Gaithersburg, Md., is also president and founder of Ithaca’s chapter of Association for Women in Sports Media.
Poe was The Daily Trojan’s sports editor last fall. She’ll take over the role of columnist when she returns to Los Angeles.
After watching Sam Darnold throw five touchdown to lead the Trojans over Penn State in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 3, 2017, Poe returned to school knowing there needed to be a story written on the quarterback.
She decided the best route was interviewing Darnold’s parents. With the help of USC, Poe was put in contact with Darnold’s mother and soon made the one-hour trip to San Clemente with a videographer.
“We were the first ones to talk to the Darnold family,” said Poe, who is from Gladston, Mo.
The three-hour visit included Chris and Mike Darnold sharing scrapbooks from Sam’s bedroom and ending with a trip to Sam Darnold’s favorite sandwich shop.
“They were still in the phase that anyone would be surprised to talk to them,” said Poe.
It wasn’t long after that SI, ESPN and The Los Angeles Times among others would also visit the Darnolds to learn more about the Heisman Trophy candidate and future No. 3 draft pick of the New York Jets.
Lewis has been busy in Los Angeles this summer working as an intern for Yahoo Sports. It’s a little bit of change from internships he previously has had with big metros like The Kansas City Star and The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
“If anything, I realized how important mobile is,” said Lewis, who will be a senior at Missouri and will settle into a role his senior year as enterprise reporter for the Columbia Missourian.
It’s been an eye-opener on how the digital world works.
His assignments in Los Angeles have included an event for hometown star James Harden, the 2018 NBA Awards, and news about the Lakers.
“I have always loved basketball so to cover NBA in a sense has been great,” said Lewis, who is from Birmingham, Ala.
Frank’s path to journalism was not as planned out as three other scholarship winners.
“I have been an athlete all of my life,” said Frank, who grew up in Portland, Ore.
Frank attempted to make Gonzaga’s cross country team as a walk-on as a freshman in the fall. While that didn’t work out, it was his decision to take journalistic writing during the same semester that changed the communications major’s course of study.
Frank’s professor put him in contact with the editor of The Gonzaga Bulletin. His first assignment in the spring of 2017 was to write about the women’s track team. He made an impression and moved from contributor to staff writer and picked up track coverage, baseball and both tennis teams.
Frank says he was hooked from there.
When his sophomore year started he was named sports editor. He will have title of senior sports editor as a junior.
The APSE Scholarship committee is made up of Chris Thomas of the Detroit Free Press; Erik Hall, sports/digital producer for USA TODAY NETWORK and writer for OutSports; Julie Jag of the Santa Cruz, Calif., Sentinel; Jeff Kuehn of the Oakland, Mich., Press; Jason Murray of the Syracuse Post-Standard; Joe Schiefelbein of the Baton Rouge Advocate; Lisa Wilson of ESPN’s The Undefeated and Phil Kaplan of the Knoxville News Sentinel.
