It all began at NYIT back in 1988 when I was a freshman ready to learn and become the next Red Smith. NYIT taught me the importance of hard work, the ability to communicate clearly, concisely and not to give up on my dream of being a sportswriter. When I was a young teenager, my late Grandmother put together a scrapbook of sports articles and told me that "you can do this." I read the articles with great interest and the idea came into my mind of writing a better story – my own story. Today I have my own scrapbook of 500-plus authored articles, my own book Game Notes: A Collection of Sports Stories, contributed to the book Baseball Stories for the Soul (which is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame) and my own baseball radio show. Without the backing of NYIT and the Communication Arts department, my path to a sportswriting career would have been more difficult to achieve and less gratifying. The NYIT faculty of Bernie Bard, John Hanc and Dr. Edward ...