Palsgrove’s Points: Staff Goodbye

Welcome back, y’all, to the final edition of this column. In just a few short weeks, I’ll be leaving this mental health vacuum we call college for the bright hopes and dreams of the American workforce, which means my time with the Liberty Champion has come to a close. I could lie and say that the Champion was just one more workplace in a collegiate career of trying to mold myself into a multifaceted member of the media, but I’ve always promised to never hold back in this column, and will continue to hold true to that. 

I wrote my first article for the Champion in September of 2021 while trying to find my footing as a fresh-faced journalist after taking my leave from Liberty University’s School of Music. I knew I had a talent for writing, but it wasn’t until I started writing for the Champion that I got my first taste of how much I truly didn’t know. I’d never conducted an interview, or recapped a game, or even watched a full game of volleyball. 

But there was a moment during my first-ever assignment that will always stick with me. During a virtual press conference after a women’s volleyball game, I was interviewing a young libero, Leah Kodat. The poor girl was so nervous on the postgame Teams call, and I didn’t understand her nervousness at first. What was there to be nervous about? She’s an NCAA athlete, and I’m just a kid conducting a janky interview from a bench in DeMoss. But she was intimidated by her first ever media appearance, just as I was scared out of my wits to talk to my first ever NCAA athlete as a member of said media. 

Years later, I’d worked my way up from being a CSER writer to being the assistant sports editor, and I was having a conversation with the former director of the Champion, Mrs. Deborah Huff. During that short conversation in her office she said one line about this small, kind of rinky-dink student newspaper that will always stick with me. 

“We tell the story of this university.” 

The job, the unspoken mission of our paper is to capture the spirit, heart and story of one of the most unique places on this ball of dirt. That one line taught me something about the purpose of the media and how crucial it is. It taught me that even at a small student newspaper, your words have an impact, which means they must, at all times, be written with purpose and with intent. Words have power, no matter who speaks them, and those of us in media must remind ourselves of that daily. 

In preparation for this column, I asked myself, “What was my favorite part about my time with the paper?” I could’ve said the trips we took to cover Liberty sports, or the office hijinks that you just had to be there for, or the late nights that brought out the lunacy in the most sane of us, but no. The best part of working at the Champion is working with those better than I am and learning from them. I learned more about graphic design from Avery Veenstra and Hannah Gilmer than from any class I’ve taken. Noah Seidlitz taught me how to actually take sports photos and how to do it well.

Annie Cory taught me how to use social media to promote content, how to write a profile to invoke the purest of emotions in my writing and how to remain patient through all the chaos of creating a newspaper. I cannot say thank you enough to those four I just mentioned but also to all of my former colleagues who have gifted me with the lessons I am blessed to be walking away with. 

So no, the Champion was not just another stop in my media journey. For three years, it was my outlet, my safe space and my home. In our always-too-cold office, I learned how to actually write, how much more I still have to learn, and I could not be more grateful. 

Thank you all for joining me in this journey of sports coverage and accidental self discovery, I hope I was able to make you laugh and teach you a thing or two while breaking down all the sports this school has to offer. 

Aaron Palsgrove, over and out.   

Palsgrove is the graduating sports editor for the Liberty Champion. Follow him on X.