I’ve written over 100 articles for The Daily Pennsylvanian. That means I have a lot of stories to share, so let me waste my word count on a funny anecdote.
It was a Friday night in October 2023 and “Halloweekend” was in full swing. While other members of the DP’s Only Section That Matters — DPOSTM — took off, I got saddled with covering the Penn vs. Brown football game, because I was playing with the Penn Band anyway. Many noteworthy moments took place.
One: Anna Vazhaeparambil, a former DP executive editor and photo editor, got an absolutely insane photo of then-sophomore, now-junior wide receiver Jared Richardson.
Two: Anna and I ranted to each other about how we were stuck covering the game as juniors.
Three: I won a costume contest just by wearing a construction vest and hat.
Four: Penn almost came back to win, but the game-winning touchdown got intercepted.
So, yeah, it was a deflating loss to say the least. And I forgot to bring a change of clothes, so I sat in the press conference room wearing my red-and-blue-striped band uniform. I stuck out like a sore thumb in an already depressed and relatively empty press conference room. I stuck out even worse when the Penn Band walked by playing music with the Brown Band, and their music permeated through the windows.
“Sorry about them,” I said after a trumpet interrupted coach Ray Priore.
“It’s alright, Kristel,” Josh Liddick, the associate director of athletics communications for Penn football, said.
It was not alright.
Regardless, neither Liddick nor Priore could knock me for my dedication to this article. It wouldn’t be the last time I had to play and write. Nor was it even the oddest of circumstances in which I’ve ever written an article. That honor goes to the curb of Lucas Oil Stadium, when the current Sports Editor Valeri Guevarra and I wrote about senior breaststroke specialist Matt Fallon qualifying for the 2024 Paris Olympics. For that article, I flew into Indianapolis on my 21st birthday on Spirit Airlines. For another article, I stayed overnight in the shadiest hotel in Bethlehem, N.H.
See? You write enough articles, and you get some weird stories.
My first road trip was not as dramatic. Penn men’s basketball lost at Yale on the road, but we still had to do a postgame interview. So that meant Alexis — the sports editor at the time — and I had a little chat with former Penn men’s basketball coach Steve Donahue in a hallway. I asked all my prewritten questions, and then, I asked him about the potential of the team’s scorers outside of then-junior guard Jordan Dingle, the team’s leading scorer during the 2022-23 season.
“You know, Kristel, that’s a good question,” Donahue said.
Dingle left after that year, Donahue was fired, and I’m going into nursing instead of journalism, so maybe none of that moment matters in the grand scheme of things. Maybe none of these stories or articles will even matter.
But to me right now, a senior on her last day of classes, they matter.
Being in the undergraduate program at Penn is an interesting time to say the least. It felt like I always had to move or always be busy, or else I was behind somehow. The sentiment applied to clubs too. Most times, it felt like if you weren’t on the executive board of a club by your sophomore year, it was time to leave and invest your time into a club that you were on executive board for.
But I never succumbed to that mindset when it came to the DP. I never ran for executive board. I never even picked up an associate shift.
I just came back — year after year, article after article — because I simply loved what I did.
I loved sitting at the Penn games, combing through a team’s statistics and fighting the urge to cheer after good plays. I loved the long hours of struggling to articulate my vision and frame an article. I loved having an excuse to do random things, like call LeBron James’ high school coach or write about hating Princeton. Positions never mattered, because I loved my work for what it was. My work with the DP was mundane and exciting, everything in between shades of Red and Blue.
It was all possible because of everyone who supported me along the way. So, thanks to every athlete, coach, and Penn Athletics staff member I’ve bothered with questions. Thank you to anyone who has ever read a sentence of my work. Thanks to my friends who threw me a party for writing 100 articles and printed them all out. Thanks to every DP staffer, especially the DPOSTMites who made every Tuesday meeting worth it.
The memories of the game-day coverage will fade, and my name will be lost in the shuffle of alumni as more and more classes graduate, but I’ll never regret an hour spent on the DP.
It was all for the love of the game — and by God did I love it.
KRISTEL RAMBAUD is a senior studying nursing. She served as a sports reporter for The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. Her email is kristel@nursing.upenn.edu.
