Butts headed to Rio as part of Olympic communication team
Mark McGee | Lipscomb Athletics |
And I think I will travel to Rio, It’s only a whimsical notion, To fly down to Rio tonight - ‘Rio’ by Michael Nesmith
Logan Butts is making plans to travel to Rio de Janeiro and there isn’t anything whimsical about his trip. He is flying down to Rio and he has a job to do.
It is a job most sportswriters work for years hoping to be assigned. Butts is going to be part of the coverage team for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this August.
“I am freaking out,” said Butts, communications assistant in Lipscomb’s athletics department. “Covering the Olympics is one of the main goals for everyone in the sports writing field. This is going to definitely the biggest audience I have ever written for. If I make a mistake the consequences are going to be higher. I am excited, but I am also nervous.
“I want to make as many connections as possible. I would like to cover the NBA one day and I am sure there will be a lot of people who cover the sport there. If I could do anything right now I would love to cover a pro basketball team.”
Butts is one of 26 graduate students who will be providing official Olympics coverage. The University of Memphis Department of Journalism and Strategic Media and the University of North Carolina’s Journalism School in Chapel Hill are the only two schools involved with the program. Butts is one of 14 students attending from the University of Memphis.
Butts, who is working on his master’s degree in journalism at Memphis online, and his fellow students will be serving as interns for the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee. Each student will be assigned specific sports to cover on a daily basis.
“I got super lucky with this,” said Butts, who is a former intern for the Shelbyville (Tennessee) Times-Gazette. “My professor, Dr. Roxane Coche, has been a reporter in Paris, covered the World Cup and has done all kinds of stuff. She has so many connections.
“I was on campus talking with my adviser who sent me to talk with Dr. Coche. She said she was putting this Olympic program together. She saw my experience in covering sports and that I would be great for it so I applied. It was the perfect time to be on campus.”
The students will be housed in the Olympics Media Village. Housing, meals and visas have been paid for through arrangements made by the two schools. Butts is scheduled to leave July 29 and will return August 23.
“I have never been out of the country before,” Butts said. “Some of the customs will be different. I know the basics about Rio. It is a huge city.
“Everyone is talking about the turmoil, the Zika virus and the dangers in the city. But this is a once in a lifetime opportunity so unless someone drags me off the plane I am going to be there.”
Butts spent the past year working for the Lipscomb University Athletics Department as a communications assistant. His primary sports have been women’s basketball, women’s soccer and men’s and women’s track and field and cross country. He also was the statistician for softball. After his trip to Rio he will return to Lipscomb for a second year of work in the athletics media relations department.
The sports included in the Summer Olympics are some of Butts’ favorites.
“They gave us a list and they told us to put down three sports we wanted to cover,” Butts said. “I put basketball first, soccer was second and track was number three.
“All 26 of us will each have sport. You will cover every event from the preliminaries to the finals for that one sport. We will be writing the stories for the Olympics wire service.”
Butts, a 2015 Lipscomb graduate with a major in communications with a journalism emphasis, started his college career as a chemistry major with plans to attend pharmacy school. But the call of journalism, in particular sports, lured him out of the lab to the courts and fields of athletics.
"Growing up I was always obsessed with sports. There are several people who influenced me to want to become a sports writer,” Butts said. “My first introduction to sports writing was when Times-Gazette reporter Gary Johnson took me with him to a game when I was younger.
“He showed me the ropes of what working a typical game was like. During my senior year of high school I took a journalism class taught by Ben Barrett, and I discovered that I enjoyed journalistic-style writing.”
He made the move to journalism his sophomore year at Lipscomb and has never regretted his decision. He has also worked at the Tennessean in the sports department.
“My first communications class was jointly taught by Dr. Jimmy McCollum and Dr. Mark McGee, and after that class I immediately knew I wanted to pursue journalism further,” Butts said. “All of those people had a helping hand in my decision to pursue sports writing, and I'm thankful they each helped me out along the way."