Ryan Gorcey: Connecting People Through Storytelling
Enterprise Writer
"Sportswriters can write anything because they have to write everything."
At a scholastic journalism conference during his junior year of high school, Ryan met longtime Los Angeles Times sports editor Bill Dwyre. The advice Dwyre gave that day has shaped Ryan's career: "Sportswriters can write anything," Dwyre said, "because they have to write everything."
Dwyre went on to explain that sportswriters have to quickly become authoritative experts in a wide variety of subjects. Sportswriters have to be able to write intelligently about medicine and anatomy (injuries and surgeries), business (franchise operations), labor (collective bargaining agreements with player unions), education (high school and college athletics), state politics (public universities that sponsor sports teams, ballot measures to fund arenas and stadiums), engineering and technology (the construction of new facilities, seismic retrofitting, environmental impact, player safety) and more. Beyond that, they must be able to distill complex and sometimes abstract subjects into something accessible and meaningful to the common reader. When faced with a sports journalism landscape contracting with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ryan proved Dwyre correct, writing on communities, education and trauma.
With sports at all levels on hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ryan pitched enterprise features on diverse topics to the Southern California News Group, for whom he'd written sports enterprise and game stories. For this feature, he profiled a diverse cross-section of teachers suffering and sacrificing through financial and psychological hardships as distance learning threw their profession into disarray.
For at least 70 days each of the last 24 summers, the Single-A Lancaster JetHawks have brought together a community that spans generations, social classes and races. When Major League Baseball threatened to contract the franchise, baseball fans in this isolated high desert city at the northern edge of Los Angeles County grappled with the fact that, after more than two decades of memories, the JetHawks had perhaps already played their final game. Despite its subject, this was not a feature about a sports team, but about a community and found family.
Nathan Castillo awakes nearly every day to a barking dog and a crying cousin before he begins his six-hour shift helming the cash register and cleaning at Emy Burgers in Florence-Graham.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person schooling in mid-March of 2020, the 17-year-old Linda Marquez High School junior had a choice: Attend his Zoom classes or help keep the restaurant his grandfather founded 32 years ago in business.