Kristen Shilton & The Turning Point

By Julian McKenzie
Photo from Kristen Shilton (Twitter)

Syracuse, NY -- The summer of 2010 was a turning point for Kristen Shilton. She hadn’t yet enrolled in Syracuse University for graduate studies, and was still years away from being TSN’s beat reporter for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

That summer, Shilton says her aunt, a graduate of Carleton University's journalism program, convinced her to push for her dream of being a sports reporter.

It ultimately led Shilton to pursue Sports Journalism studies at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario and at Syracuse in the Magazine, Newspaper, Online Journalism Master's program, even if her parents weren’t on board with her getting another degree.

“My parents were like, ‘What are you thinking? You already have a degree, you don’t need to do this’,” she said in a telephone interview.

Following her studies at Syracuse, Shilton had stints at USA Football, the American Hockey League’s Chicago Wolves, and covered this past year’s National Hockey League playoffs with USA Today.

Shilton came across the job posting for TSN through a friend on Twitter, an opportunity she almost missed. 

"I don’t even know if I would’ve seen the posting if he hadn’t alerted me to it," Shilton said. "It’s Toronto so [I was] sure I wouldn’t even hear from them,"

Shilton did and was hired in time to cover the Maple Leafs' draft in Buffalo, where they selected forward Auston Matthews as the first overall pick.

Six years after Shilton was at a crossroads trying to decide her future, she's now a reporter in Canada's busiest sports city.



JM: Julian McKenzie
KS: Kristen Shilton, @kristen_shilton, Toronto Maple Leafs reporter for TSN

KS: Hello?

JM: Hi, is this Kristen Shilton?

KS: Yes, it is.

JM: Hey, it’s Julian McKenzie. How are you doing?

KS: I’m fine how are you?

JM: Doing great, doing great. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my call and answer a few questions for my assignment.

KS: Yeah, no problem.

JM: So, first things first I want to get started with your background with Syracuse University. What year were you there and what program did you study in?

KS: I did my Master’s degree in Magazine, Newspaper, Online Journalism with the Sports Communications Emphasis in 2011-2012, so I graduated May of 2012.

JM: What university back home in Canada were you studying before you got to Syracuse? How did you hear about the university?

KS: I got my Bachelors of English from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, which is actually my hometown, and then I also did a graduate program for one year at Loyalist College in Sports Journalism in Belleville, Ontario. I heard about Syracuse, really it was that summer after I graduated from undergrad. I was working in Toronto at the time and I was doing some research. It was one of those programs that came up when you were searching for…I was looking for a sports journalism Master’s program basically and that’s how I found out about it, was just through various sites that were sort of directing you to sports Master’s degrees.

JM: Out of curiosity, while you were at Wilfrid Laurier, did you work with any of the student media there, did you work with, I think their newspaper is called, The Cord?

KS: No. You know what? I worked full-time, or almost full-time when I was in school so I really didn’t do all that much at Laurier because I had so much going on outside of school.

JM: So when it came time for you to go to Syracuse, did you know of any other people from where you were at in Canada who were willing to say you know what, ‘I was willing to go to Syracuse’. Did you go to them for advice? Did you know of any of their prestigious alumni and consulted them for advice?

KS: No. I knew about the alumni network that Syracuse has. The more research I did, the more I found about a lot of their big names and coming from Canada you don’t really get a sense of the college athletics scene. And a lot of Syracuse alumni are in sports media. I didn’t have a lot of exposure to a lot of the alumni and I wasn’t aware that a lot of them came through Syracuse but as I did more research, got to know who had come through there, I would’ve liked to have reached out to some before I got to school but it was after I was there that I was able to connect with them.

JM: Talk about your experience during your one year at Syracuse, was it fun?

KS: It was fun. It was a lot different from my college experience in Canada. I had never really been on my own, either in life, or as much on your own work as they gave you in Syracuse. It was really sort of, give you the tools that you need and then tell you to go out and find the story. You don’t get a lot of direction, which ended up being great for me as a journalist now. Just seeing that sort of confidence in myself and my own abilities. The boot camp was hard, it was one of the hardest six weeks that I’ve ever done in school for sure because it was so intensive. That part wasn’t really that fun but once I got the hang of Syracuse and how the year there was going to go, I had a blast. If I look back, that was probably one of the best years of my life. Just learning the craft, all the opportunities that we had. It didn’t get much better than Syracuse.

JM: I wish I asked this question before I jumped into Syracuse but why do you have an interest in sports reporting and sports media, and where do you think that started?

KS: Growing up where i did, you know hockey is such a big, big sport, but there just really weren’t a lot of women covering hockey that I saw. There weren’t really a lot of women in general covering sports up here. You didn’t see it very often at a larger level. So I didn’t really think much of being a sports reporter for a long time because even though I loved sports and I was passionate about journalism. I didn’t really think the two would go together for me. I didn’t think I’d have the opportunities that I wanted to have to be successful. I didn’t really want to do just journalism which is why I got a degree in English. The passion for me really started in undergrad because I became so much more invested in sports and the more I learned about writing, I became more passionate about the craft itself. So by the time I got to my internship after my undergrad year, it was sort of like what I want to do after my job, I know that’s it’s not sitting at a desk all day. I know that I spend more time reading sports online than I do, probably, doing my internship. That’s when I knew this is what I was passionate about and this is what I wanted to do. So the Summer of 2010 was a really big turning point for me.

JM: So the Summer of 2010 was when you realized that’s when you wanted to get into sports journalism for real? Was there anything else that happened in that summer that also led to that?

KS: My aunt went to Carleton, she got her journalism degree. Carleton’s probably the best journalism school in Canada. I talked to her a lot that summer because we working at the same place. I think that changed for me in terms of her saying, ‘if that’s your passion then you should go do it. Even if it scares you’. And it did. The idea of changing courses after I already invested four years in what I was doing. It was scary to think about starting out new and I’d have to go get a new degree and there was a whole, ‘if it didn’t work out, what would I do’? I think that was one of the biggest things that changed for me was just having somebody who had done journalism school say ‘go do it, and if you’re going to work hard then you can be successful at it’.

JM: One question I want to ask. I know there aren’t a lot of women in sports media, so it’s okay if the answer to this question isn’t necessarily a woman, but growing up, who did you admire specifically in sports media as a journalist or as an announcer? Are you able to name some examples?

KS: Announcer-wise, Joe Bowen with the Maple Leafs was always someone that I absolutely loved. Who is the guy who does Blue Jays broadcasts on the Fan 590. I completely forgot his name!

JM: I’m blanking on his name as well.

KS: I was just listening to the game before you called and I can’t think of what the heck his name is. Anyway, him and Joe Bowen, for me, they were two people that were so distinctive in the way they announced games. The way they were able to sort of capture the atmosphere even though they were on the radio. I always thought that they were two people that I enjoyed listening to. As far as writers go, I’ve been asked this before. There were writers I always liked but I was never paying attention, it was the story. The stories I was reading were great but for me, there were just so many who cover Toronto sports that I probably couldn’t name exactly who it was that was writing what I was reading. And we didn’t have the Internet, it wasn’t what it was today when I was growing up. We listened to a lot of stuff on the radio. So I think that when I think about the people that really made me love sports, it was those two that really inspired the passion in me. Then it was really fiction writers that made me want to become a writer. Now, there’s a ton of writers who I read on a daily basis that I think are fantastic.

JM: Can you mention some of those writers that you read about right now?

KS: I look at a guy named James Mirtle with the Globe & Mail. For the last few years, I’ve been reading what he’s writing. I really love guys down in the States, even if they cover football like Mike Reese who covers the Patriots for ESPN. I really love his stuff. Craig Custance with ESPN. Katie Strang. Those guys are great. I love Pat Leonard of the New York Daily News. And then out West, Lisa Delman with the LA Times. She’s a fantastic hockey writer. I’m blanking on his name, Eric Stevens with the OC County Register. I love him. I just love people who can capture the essence, the spirit of what’s happening. There’s nothing worse than reading a boring play-by-play of what happened in a game. You can watch that, but you want somebody who can capture more and they do a really good job of that.

JM: Let’s go to life after Newhouse. What was your first job out of Syracuse?

KS: The first thing I did when I left Syracuse, I moved to Indianapolis and I worked for USA Football for two and a half months. I was in the youth governing body of the NFL, so that was the first thing I did.

JM: How long between USA Football from that until you ended up with the Chicago Wolves? Because apparently you worked with the Chicago Wolves, correct?

KS: I did. It was supposed to be a three-month internship in Indy, but I got my internship with the Wolves. I got that, it was supposed to be at the beginning of September. I was supposed to be with USA Football through the end of September but I left a few weeks early to start with the Wolves. I think it was September 12th of 2012 that I started with the Wolves.

JM: What were you doing exactly with the Wolves?

KS: They hired me originally as a communications intern, which is really just doing stat sheets, typing things up for the media relations department, that’s sort of what i was hired to do. But for me, I immediately tried to take on a bigger role with writing, doing stuff for the website. I quickly transformed into the digital media coordinator for the team and I did everything related to the website. I went to practice, I would report on what was going on there. Do interviews. I was in charge of the in-arena magazine, writing all the stories for that. And i would do at least weekly, bi-weekly stories that would go up online. I would go to all the games and do the game stories and then I would watch the games at home when they were on the road. The Wolves are one of those rare AHL teams that had a TV deal in Chicago so you could watch the games wherever they were. So I would watch the games online and then I would write a game story on that. Plus I ran all of our social media platforms as well. Basically anything digital media related, I did with the Wolves.

JM: Can you go through some of the prospects and players that you got to see while you were dealing with the Chicago Wolves? What NHL affiliate are they associated with?

KS: Well the first year I was there, they were with the Vancouver Canucks and the second year they switched with the St. Louis Blues who they’re still affiliated with. With the Canucks there were guys on the team like Zack Kassian, Jordan Schroeder, a couple of others. A lot of them would come and go, it was quite a trek for them from Vancouver to Chicago but with the Blues, Jake Allen was there, his first year. That was such a great experience to get to see him start to find himself as a pro, now seeing how great he’s doing. It was funny, my first real experience in hockey was covering Jake Allen and then I covered the Blues through the last NHL playoffs. So getting to see him at that level was pretty cool. Then Dmitri Jaskin, Ty Rattie, were also two guys who stood out when they were with the Wolves.

JM: You mentioned that you covered Zack Kassian, but you covered Jake Allen [in the playoffs], I assume that was with USA Today?

KS: Yes. So when I left the Wolves to join USA Today, it was in my role with them that I was covering the playoffs.

JM: How was that experience with USA Today?

KS: That was really the most transformative experience that I’ve had as a professional. It was, again, kind of like with the Wolves, it started out as something different than what I ultimately made it into because that’s what you have to do in this business. So it’s very little that’s going to be given to you, you really have to make it your own if you know what you want to do. I was a digital producer, that’s what I was hired to do, which is essentially just editing stories that come in and then posting them on the website. And I really wanted to do NHL and I knew that there was an opportunity for that based on what I had talked about with our NHL editor at the time. It was a lot of work, it was a lot of doing work on my own time. It was a lot of writing on my own time, reporting on my own time. I would go to [Los Angeles] Kings games and [Anaheim] Ducks games on my days off to cover those, to have the opportunity to be there. When the Kings won the Stanley Cup the first year I was in LA, that was unbelievable just to see that run they were on after the Olympic break was over. A lot of what I did there, taking advantage of opportunity, it ended up being twice as much work as you’d want to do in a full-time job, but it was completely worth it and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. It gave me a huge jumping off point into what will hopefully be the rest of my career as a hockey writer.

JM: And now you managed to get yourself one of the best jobs you can get, in terms of being a beat reporter, for one of the most talked about franchises in the league, the Toronto Maple Leafs, back home. Tell the story of how TSN came knocking?

KS: I checked my Twitter one day in March of this year and a friend of mine actually forwarded me the job posting of how TSN was looking to hire someone, so he tagged me on Twitter, ‘oh hey you should look at this’. I don’t even know if I would’ve seen the posting if he hadn’t alerted me to it. I saw what they were looking for and I ended up applying thinking that they’d get so many applications. It’s Toronto so sure I wouldn’t even hear from them but I did. It was a while before they were really looking to bring somebody on because the Leafs weren’t going to make the playoffs so they didn't really need anybody right away. So it was a bit of a slower process getting the interviews done but eventually I came up from Chicago to meet everybody up here and yeah, they hired me in May. Right in the Western Conference final time frame. I came up here two weeks later and it’s been a whirlwind, it’s been crazy but that’s kind of how the business works I guess.

JM: Are you actually a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs?

KS: I grew up in a Maple Leafs household but I think the thing about once you sort of decide that you want to be a sports writer, you really stop looking at one team in any sport as if ‘oh that’s my team’ or ‘that’s the team I cheer for’. So I definitely grew up on the Leafs. My family are huge fans. But for me, personally, because I was so busy trying to become a hockey writer myself, you definitely stop having any allegiance to any team. You see players and you think ‘oh, I hope that player does well” and ‘that player’s a good guy, I hope he does well’. I would not characterize myself as a fan of any team really in any sport anymore. You root for certain guys that you get to know along the way much more than a team.

JM: So you pretty much say, it’s pretty easy for you, in your reporting, or your tweeting, or however you get news out to your followers. It’s pretty easy for you to separate any kind of fandom that you may have in your material. There’s some reporters out there that kind of wear their team on their sleeves and you see it in their reporting and in the assessments on the team they cover.

KS: Yeah it can definitely be a struggle for some people, especially when you spend so much time around one specific team, or if you did grow up on a team and you have that emotional connection to them. It can be difficult and I’ve seen it be difficult for some writers to be able to say something that may be unfavourable or unkind, they may try to spin it so it doesn’t look so bad on the team. For me, I don’t really find it to be difficult because my philosophy is just: anything that I say or write, I want it to be honest and I want it to be able to back it up with facts. If you can back up what you’re saying with facts then no one, not a player, or an executive, or a follower of yours, will be able to say that you have any kind of bias, whether it’s positive or negative against the team. My other thing is, is that I never want to be a reporter who is trying to stir the pot or saying things that are outlandish or crazy. There’s so much at your disposal today with every kind of advanced statistic that you would ever want to know, it’s very easy to separate yourself, at least for me it is, to separate yourself from fandom. Because you don’t look at it that way, you’re not there to hope that they win or that they lose. You’re there to just say this is what happened and you know, that’s it.

JM: The last question for this interview that I want to ask you, and I know it’s only been a few months since you’ve started to cover the Toronto Maple Leafs as a beat reporter. But how exciting is it? It seems as if it is, with all the stuff that’s going around. You’re there, you’re actually getting to cover them on a daily basis, what’s that experience like?

KS: I don’t even know how to describe it. I really started right before the draft. So the whole thing with Auston Matthews being there, I got a chance to get to know him a little bit, know what he was about. We had some brief 1-on-1 conversations in Buffalo where I kind of got a sense of who he is. But he’s really changed this city and this beat especially, I think, coming on to it. When the team you’re covering has the number one overall pick and it is somebody like Matthews who has so much potential, it’s been great, it’s been tough adjusting, I guess, at the speed which everything has happened. You look at the draft, and then free agency start, and then the Leafs had development camp at Niagara Falls. You have all these storylines right out of the gate and I wasn’t really following the team very closely, I was sort of a beat behind everybody else and they already knew more. I worked with USA Today right up to the day I started. So I really didn’t have a lot of time to get the back story and a lot of that beforehand. It was definitely a challenging experience but it’s been phenomenal. I couldn’t have asked for a better company to come into because everyone at TSN wants you to succeed. Everyone’s willing to help. The guys I grew up watching on TV like Bob McKenzie and Darren Dreger, they’re so willing to help anytime you have a question. Challenging, but amazing, would  be how I’d describe it so far.

JM: Now how do I get a job at TSN after I finish here in Syracuse?

KS: You have such an opportunity and the fact is that the opportunities you have there that I had in the year that I was there, what they say to the people they hire at TSN is that they’re head and shoulders above everybody else. You’re lucky because the program that you’re in is going to give you the tools to be head and shoulders above everyone else and that’s why Syracuse was the craziest thing I’ve ever done. My parents were like, ‘what are you thinking, you already have a degree, you don’t need to do this’. But you’re going to get so much good information and you’re going to get so much great mentors that in a year from now, come talk to me, we’ll see where you’re at. Do what you want to do, you never know what could come up, right?