Photo taken from Casey Phillips on LinkedIn
By Dominic Feo
If you scroll through the Tampa Bay Buccaneers YouTube channel, you will find hundreds of videos featuring team reporter Casey Phillips. In every video, you will notice her bright and stylish outfit.
“I think about colors and how it’s going to look on camera, I think about my personality and what seems to kind of fit me,” Phillips said about her fashion sense. “I like the idea of things being bright colors and professional, but fun.”
Photo courtesy of @caseyreporting on Instagram
This semester, Phillips has brought that professional, but fun attitude with her to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus as an adjunct professor, teaching the campus’s first ever sports broadcasting class.
Phillips previously worked with USF through the Lee Roy Selmon Mentoring Institute as a mentor for student athletes. After offering to be a guest lecturer last summer, Phillips was told that a sports reporting class was in the works and was asked to teach it.
“I had always thought I wanted to teach, it’s why I got my master’s… to have the chance to teach someday. It just felt like this perfect timing situation that was meant to be,” Phillips said.
The University of Missouri-Columbia alum had to face the unique challenges that came with creating a class from scratch.
“It was daunting learning how to use Canvas and how to put together a syllabus, and… nitty gritty work that I hadn’t thought about that would go into it as it compared to being a teacher, that there’s just already a class ready for you,” Phillips said.
Phillips now hopes to make as positive of an impact on her students as her professors made on her. She said that she’s stayed in touch with many of her teachers and carries their lessons with her throughout her work.
One of the factors that motivates Philips to be an educator is, “the idea of getting to help the next generation of people who want to do this so that someday they’ll think back to things that [she] taught them in class.”
In Phillip’s class, officially titled “On-Camera Sports Reporting,” she teaches students the ins and outs of sports broadcasting. Students learn about live sports coverage, interviewing, sideline reporting and more.
Practicing live shots has been a point of emphasis for Phillips, as her students rehearse different forms of broadcasting in class and record rehearsals for homework. She knows that not all of them plan on pursuing a career in sports journalism, so she emphasizes teaching public speaking skills that are useful for any career path.
“I think that I really would love everyone to learn how to be good conversationalists, how to ask the right questions, and how to be comfortable talking to people,” Phillips explained.
As for her students who are working towards a career in sports journalism, she has taught them that the most important thing they can do is take initiative.
“You have to actively seek out all the stories, all of the relationships, all of that stuff that is not a job for someone who is passive,” Phillips said. “Always be thinking about what you can do more and what opportunities there are, and how you can make the most of it.”
