NFL Players Alumni Association Goes Deep to Support Daily Cal

It was half time at a Sunday evening Seattle Storm Women's National Basketball Association game, and Stephen Chen, on assignment for the Tacoma News Tribune, scrambled to find a quiet corner in the media booth above the court to take a phone call. Chen, a May 2008 UCB graduate and the Daily Cal's outgoing Editor in Chief, was just completing his second week as an intern on the News Tribune's sports desk. The weeks since graduation had been hectic. He had completed a two-week training at the Sports Journalism Institute in Florida and since joining the News Tribune in June his assignments had already included covering such pro teams as the Storm, the MLB Seattle Mariners and the Tacoma Rainiers, the Mariners AAA farm team. The 23-year-old Fremont native who graduated with majors in mass communication and business administration was, quite happily, loving every minute of the career in sports journalism he had envisioned for himself.

Meanwhile, a thousand or so miles to the south, Brian Bainum, The Daily Cal's sports editor in Fall 2005, was spending the same Sunday evening polishing a bit of copy on the sports desk of the Marin Independent Journal in San Rafael where he is listed as a part-time reporter covering high school and college games. The reality, however, is that he works more than full time (the other designation just means he doesn't get benefits) and has on several occasions gotten to staff the MLB Giants in San Francisco's AT&T park. He, too, couldn't be happier. "I don't know what else I'd do if I couldn't do this," he admits.

That Chen and Bainum should have landed the jobs of their dreams in what certainly is one of print journalism's worst hiring cycles ever speaks volumes of their talent and, of course, Daily Cal training, an experience that was helped along by a unique scholarship that each young man received as a student journalist. The scholarship, awarded annually since 2006 by the Northern California Chapter of the National Football League Alumni, offers $1,000 to a Daily Cal staff writer interested in sports reporting, photography or marketing. The program was established by Steven Kinney, the chapter's president and a Chicago Bears tackle from 1972 to 1975, at the instigation of Diane Rames, the Daily Cal's professional general manager and a frequent volunteer for NFL Alumni charity events in the Bay Area. According to Kinney, Rames had given so much time to the chapter's "Caring for Kids" programs that its 800 members, who include former Cal players Sherman White, Chuck Muncie, Gary Plummer and Craig Morton, wanted to return the favor for her favorite deserving cause: the Daily Cal. "We sort of stretched our mission a bit to include college kids," he explains. "We have a passion for sports and are very interested in how it's portrayed. We want to push a positive image of sports and get it, you know, out of jurisprudence coverage."

Kinney will be attending the Daily Cal Alumni reception October 4, 2008, where he will present the third annual scholarship to a deserving student journalist.