Drew Maddox

Hi, I'm Drew — a journalism student at UGA who got into this because I genuinely can't stop paying attention. To the game. To the crowd. To the one person in the room who has something real to say.

I started covering sports at Roswell High — game recaps, senior nights, the kind of stories that matter a lot to the people in them and almost nobody else. That felt right to me. Still does. But the truth is I had been writing long before that, and the passion for sports had been building for even longer. Live events were never casual for me — I was always the one paying attention to what was actually happening.

Music came in the same way. Not gradually — I had been to enough shows to know that a great live performance and a great game have more in common than people think. Both demand your full attention. Both give you something you can't get from a screen. Writing about a Harry Styles set or a Taylor Swift film felt like the same instinct as writing a match report. I just had to figure out the language.

Sports and culture are what I keep coming back to — not as separate beats, but as the same conversation happening in different rooms. I'm looking for the connective tissue. The moment a game becomes a story, or a song becomes a document. I'm at Grady College now, and I'm paying close attention.

I'm also trying to get better at the long form — the kind of piece that takes three weeks and earns every word. Profiles, mostly. I think people are the story, almost always.

When I'm not in a notebook, I'm at a show, courtside, or deep in someone else's best work — trying to figure out what made it land.