Grace Nugent
“Reporting by Grace Nugent.” To fans of McCallum athletics, that has become a familiar phrase over the years. It’s a phrase that one can find attributed to an astounding amount of baseball and football captions and stories of many flavors over the past four years. While it’s hard work doing what she does, senior Grace Nugent loves it, and immerses herself in it, some on newspaper staff may say, even a little too much.
In the fall, she’s on the sidelines at football games, studying the field like Joe Buck in the booth. In the spring, she’s in the dugout at baseball games, analyzing every play, every pitch, every sign as if channeling her inner Vin Scully.
On the gridiron, Nugent found particular joy this year in the team’s 14-13 Taco Shack victory against the rival Anderson Trojans. It hadn’t been since her freshman year that the team had won the rivalry game, and this time around, it just meant a little more. She attributes that feeling to not only her dislike for the opposing school, but also to her bond with the team.
“When you cover a team, you kind of form a bond or an emotional attachment to them,” Nugent said.
While the bond she shared with the football team, specifically the huge class of seniors she had spent the last four years covering, was tight, when spring rolled around and it became baseball season, an even tighter bond started again.
As the baseball team manager, Nugent has become an integral part of the group over the years. Sitting in the dugout with a scorecard in hand, she keeps a close eye on the diamond in front of her, watching every movement from the eye of someone who’s been in love with the game all her life.
Nugent describes her bond with the team “like the babysitter you like spending time with.” According to her, babysitter/manager duties include, “taping their wrists because they’re incapable of doing it themselves, making sure they drink water, and catching when Coach Grant messes up his lineup cards—which is often.”
“I’m like a mini coach that doesn’t get to call pitches or steal signs or anything like that,” she says of her time with the team.
As much time as she spends on the sidelines, Nugent has another home on campus: room 134. As co-editor-in-chief of the newspaper, she rules with an iron fist, scaring many seventh period staffers into finishing their stories.
While she may be a commanding leader of the newspaper room, she also brings laughs and great company to her fellow writers during the hours that she spends there daily.
Aside from her double blocked period that Nugent has in the newspaper room, her favorite times are spent long after the school has emptied at late knights, the newspaper staff’s way of coming together after school to help push out the next issue. Along with the other staffers who join her at those late hours, she shares some of the best times getting in last minute stories, stressing about issues, drinking an unhealthy amount of coffee and eating Torchy’s Tacos.
Those working-past-midnight, sleep-deprived-nights have been part of Nugent’s life for the past four years, and along with the rest of her high school journalism career, she’s going to look back on them fondly in the coming years.
“I’m going to miss MacJ a lot,” Nugent said. “It’s really awesome and it’s been like the structuring foundation I’ve had for four years. School for me doesn’t really revolve around when grades are due, it revolves around when the issue is coming out. It’s going to be really weird to not have that next year and I’m going to miss it a lot.”
Next year, Nugent will provide her journalistic talents to a new part of the country. She will be moving up to Chapel Hill to join the sea of Carolina blue at the University of North Carolina. There, she will major in journalism with either a minor or a double major in political science, something she made clear was her mother’s doing.
“My mom has wanted me to go be a lawyer since I was tiny because she says I’ve argued with her since I could talk,” Nugent said.
Her success in Ms. Summerville’s AP Government class could be a glimpse into her political future, but for now she’s focused on continuing her sports journalism career. With so much success covering high school athletics, Nugent will add another award-winning sports journalist to an already well heralded Tar Heels program.
One day, as ESPN is running in the background of every bar in America, it should come as a surprise to no one when the ‘Grace Nugent Sports Talk Show’ comes on for another section of in depth coverage of Texas Rangers Baseball.
Caption by Thomas Melina Raab
Student Council (9th, 10th, 11th)
MacJ (9th, 10th, 11th, 12th), Won 75+ awards for contributing work to the newspaper, Sports editor (11th), co-online editor-in-chief (11th) co-editor-in-chief (12th)
Voting Club (11th)
Student Leadership team (11th, 12th)
Baseball manager (10th, 11th, 12th)