Sports writers are the five-tool players, the decathletes, the tweeners (pick your favorite cliché) of the newsroom. They routinely write on tight deadlines. They are required to produce not only nuts-and-bolts news coverage, but issue stories and profiles. And they do their best work when they see the connections between what happens on the field and what happens off it. I grew up as a writer in the sports department, and that strong base has allowed me to expand to writing on gender, higher education and the crafts of teaching and writing.