I Left a Six-Figure Sports Media Job to Get a Journalism Degree — Here's Why

I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of people’s dream jobs in the seven years since I graduated from UCLA. NFL editor at CBS Sports, editorial researcher and photo editor at NFL Network — titles that I once was certain would bring me so much fulfillment. 

I grew up watching Around the Horn and college sports with my childhood best friend Drew after school. Once we were done with our usual yard romping and swimming pool antics, we’d hunker down in his dad’s office and flip between whatever ESPN and ESPN2 had to offer. Drew’s aunt happens to be the legendary Jackie MacMullan, which only added to the magic. While I didn’t always know I wanted to work in sports, the spark was formed watching her excellence seep through the picture tubes of that CRT. 

Drew’s family has sports in its DNA. Beyond Jackie, his parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles either were or still are incredible athletes. There’s a good chance Drew himself is on a run while you’re reading this. His dad coached baseball and worked the chain gang at high school football games, letting us kids tag along to run wild. My parents would take us to UNH and UMass Lowell hockey games, even letting us chant, “See you, asshole,” whenever an opponent’s player headed to the penalty box.

While I had my moderate share of team successes, I’ve never been much of an athlete. For starters, I’ve always been bigger — my sister likes to say us Possee girls are never at any risk of being blown over. Once a giant in youth volleyball, I never grew beyond 5-foot-8 and quickly lost my edge in high school. Even with glasses, I can only really see out of one eye. I was also a pretty sickly kid. I’ve been plagued by injuries and constant pain that I now know was likely related to the autoimmune diseases I’m just beginning to get treatment for. 

All this to say, I realized pretty early that making it beyond a high school varsity team wasn’t really on the table. 

But man, do I love sports. Watching sports, listening to people talk about sports, creating mental scouting reports whenever I attend an amateur baseball game, getting way too emotionally attached to a college basketball team I have zero connection to (go Jayhawks), crafting the perfect fantasy football draft and waiver wire strategy — all very much in my wheelhouse. 

ESPN is the closest thing I’ve had to religion in my life. I cried real tears watching the final episode of Around the Horn in May. I was hired at Action Network to help run their NFL and fantasy football coverage in part because of my giddiness to be interviewed by Chad Millman, the former editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine. I’d never been able to keep my mind quiet enough to actually enjoy a podcast until ESPN Daily launched in 2019. (Mina Kimes’ episode about the Liberty City neighborhood in Miami is one of my favorite pieces of journalism.) 

It took me a long time to admit this desire to be a part of the sports world to myself. Most of these thoughts were subconscious. Being surrounded by so many incredible athletes throughout my life and people with encyclopedic knowledge of every league (the type who prefer just sitting around naming old sports players) made it tough to see a place for myself in that world. 

My school’s athletic trainer, Jay Grant, helped me start finding my place in it. Senior year of high school, he took pity on me when I was benched with a shoulder injury. After breaking the news that I was out, he took a break from wrapping ankles and tending to other students getting ready for games that evening and turned to me. 

“Do you want to photograph the football game tonight?” He asked. 

I could almost feel the final puzzle piece nestling into place.

To this day, I remember his crash course on aperture, exposure and ISO. I headed out to the sidelines and realized not only did I have a knack for sports photography, but also I had a clear path in front of me.

This was my golden ticket. Armed with a Nikon D750 and unburdened by the fact that I would never be the star player, I arrived at UCLA the next fall. Photographing games at the Rose Bowl was the reason I gave when they asked why I chose to go to school across the country — how can you argue with that?

I began at the Daily Bruin as a photo intern, my time spent running around to gymnastics meets and volleyball games. Some of my favorite memories of undergrad involve lugging my telephoto lens around Pauley Pavilion and Jackie Robinson Stadium. I made it to the Rose Bowl too, of course. I still have the stadium layout ingrained in my mind, but my stomach never stops fluttering when I walk through that tunnel.

Even when the weather was bad or the score embarrassing, the magic of being there, of capturing the moment, was more than enough. My love for photography flourished, as did my passion for working at the paper. Soon I was snapping up any shoot I could get my hands on, be it trailing a family attending a UCLA science fair or following around a campus-famous corgi at Corgi Beach Day.

My sophomore year, I was ready for more responsibility and became an assistant photo editor. The good and bad news was that this meant most of my job was done in the newsroom instead of in the field. Training and mentoring the new photographers was exciting in a new way, and I realized that finding a way to make all the puzzle pieces come together and form a paper each day as an editor had its own magic. 

So I took fewer and fewer photoshoot assignments and worried more about the bigger picture. Of keeping the team going and getting a paper onto the newsstand each morning. 

My love of sports never left, but my mind was preoccupied as I learned on the fly how to be a leader. I lived and breathed the paper.

If you’ve read some of my other management-focused posts here, you know that I take a lot of pride in running teams well. It all started in the Daily Bruin School of Hard Knocks — a windowless newsroom that became my classroom from 12:30 p.m. budget until the early hours of the next morning some days.

I became editor-in-chief of the Daily Bruin for my third and final year at UCLA (yes, I’m a nerd who graduated early). I was the first woman editor-in-chief in four years and the first from the photo department in a decade. Running a staff of seventy-plus editors and a few hundred contributors was a challenge I felt ready to take head on. 

I got a lot out of my time as editor-in-chief. Perhaps most importantly, the newspaper made it to the stands five days a week despite how many times we flirted with our printer’s “final” deadline. And let’s not forget the lifelong friends I made, or the assistant online editor who at first was bitter he wasn’t chosen as the top editor and is now my husband of four years. (He made me this website!) 

But it was so much harder than I could have imagined. The newsroom flirted with actually becoming my home — there was more than one night spent on the navy blue loveseat in my office. Sixty-hour work weeks were the norm, which is something I genuinely can’t remember how I handled alongside school. Sleepless nights before finals cramming material I’d pushed aside for some fire drill or another — once a literal fire drill when the Skirball Fire hit Bel Air on my 21st birthday — became the norm. 

The interpersonal aspect of managing a large team of students, all juggling their own classes and lives alongside their hefty Daily Bruin workload, was a challenge. I like to think I passed with flying colors, but I’m sure there are a few people from the staff who would disagree. Hopefully they know I really did try my best every single day.

The newspaper has since cut down to three print editions a week, a change I fully support. I’ve never worked harder in my life and felt more rewarded, but the cost at certain times was higher than it needed to be. 

By the time spring came around, stress-induced insomnia had landed me with an Ambien prescription and a wake-up call. Continuing to work in breaking, hard news after graduating was off the table. I hadn’t had time to enjoy any sports content beyond the stories I was editing, only making it to one football game that year. 

After being in survival mode and failing to even think about doing an internship before graduation, some key connections landed me a role as a photo editor at NFL Media in Culver City. It felt like an absolutely miraculous outcome.

I was in control of things once again, my path pointing in the direction I’d hoped for since I was a kid. Maybe I wasn’t setting myself up to become the managing editor of The Boston Globe, but I was alright with that. Nothing was life or death; the facts were still important but typically much less intense. 

What they don’t tell you about burning out is the sorcery that happens once you put in the work to get mentally healthy again. There were struggles of course — I long for the day a woman can work in this industry and have no stories to tell. But overall, things were much easier for me in the professional world.

That year of grinding as editor-in-chief was still the hardest job I’ve ever had, and I say that as someone who until recently was a senior director leading a professional newsroom. It prepared me for more than I could have possibly imagined while I was going through it. (Also a quick plug here that I’ve since hired or referred several young Daily Bruin alumni to roles that they have more than excelled at. If you have one of their resumes cross your desk, consider it a gift.)

People around me noticed that my experience on paper paled compared to what I brought to the table. My trajectory wasn’t unlike the one I experienced at the Daily Bruin, starting in photography and branching out to as many editorial and leadership opportunities as I could get my hands on. Once that happened, my career started moving fast. I didn’t apply to my last four jobs. I’ve managed people with children my age. Getting to the executive level is exciting and a privilege. 

Much like the first time I picked up a camera, leading teams feels natural to me in a way I don’t take for granted. I’ve been reading “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni and realized that my inherent trust in the people around me and lack of ego are a big part of that. Maybe it all stems from never being the star player, always quietly contributing to the teams I played on but never doing anything more impressive than that.

Despite all of the exultation I get out of leading teams, something has been missing in the last year or so. Running things isn’t always as fulfilling as building or creating them. 

My first experience with major layoffs left a chasm in the department I was now leading. Meetings trying to reinforce a veil of artificial harmony ruled most of my days. The stress that once kept me up at night in college returned, feeling like an elephant forcing its way through my body and into the mattress. But instead of the relative levity of early adulthood, now it was livelihoods and wellbeing that I was responsible for. 

Not to mention how far away from loving sports I’d become. I used to be able to tell you the name and number of just about any active NFL player, but last season I could barely keep up with the news cycle. My fantasy team was lucky if I remembered to click the “optimize lineup” button most weekends. Search and traffic struggles alongside cut budgets had me only rooting for whatever meant the most clicks for our website. When I tell you that I was one tough Google algorithm update from walking out of my home in Seattle and into the Puget Sound, please know that’s not an exaggeration. 

Alongside all of this and well beyond sports, the 2024 U.S. presidential election and everything that’s followed haven’t helped the simultaneous burnout and restlessness I was experiencing. Once I admitted to myself that something big needed to change before I fully lost myself again, things got easier. 

That brings me to today. Much like that decision I made to go back to what I found comfort in when I finished college, I’m forging a new path. Only this time, it’s not exclusively sports I’m after, though I’m sure they will play a part as they always do. My desire now is to return to creating, not stay stuffed inside the windowless newsroom.

I’m writing this after wrapping up my final day at work before moving down to Palo Alto for the next nine months while I pursue my master’s degree in journalism at Stanford. 

I could try to run through the logic I used to convince myself that quitting my six-figure job to do this wasn’t a wild choice in this job market especially, but I’m not sure you’d find it compelling. The only through line I’ve had in my career, starting way back when I discovered sports photography in high school, is that I find a way to make the most of whatever it is I enjoy doing. I dive head first into things and follow anything that brings me joy and lets my talents thrive.

Studying journalism officially (UCLA doesn’t have a journalism major so I studied communication) will give me every opportunity to pinpoint exactly what it is I’m meant to be doing. Add in getting to share all of my management thoughts here, and I know I’ll be able to zero in on what the next phase of my life looks like. 

I’m confident things will work out. Not because the world owes that to me or because I’m so great that this will be easy, but because I know I’ll keep going until I find what fills my cup. I just hope you’re all ready for it when I do. 

— Kenzie Possee

Seattle, September 2025