I had a lot of growing up to do when I first got to UCLA. I came from the smallest high school in a small city.

There are a lot of perks to covering sports for the Daily Bruin.
I got to attend almost every football and basketball game last year, travelled to six different games in three different states and was paid to write about it all.

The Olympics officially ended last Sunday, but the scandalous storylines that surfaced during the three-week-long Games are far from over. The U.S. Soccer Federation terminated Hope Solo’s contract Wednesday after comments the famed goalie made following the U.S.’s shockingly early quarterfinal exit.

A photo of Michael Phelps adorned my 14th birthday cake. My middle school email password was the infamous swimmer’s name. Following the 2004 Athens Olympics, I took up swim classes.

I covered football for six months at the beginning of last school year. Before that, I worked the men’s volleyball beat for two years, with some men’s water polo and soccer in the mix.

We have a running tally in the sports section of all the clichéd responses we receive during interviews. When training new writers, we place special emphasis on answers that don’t count as answers because they are so unoriginal.

The all-girls high school I went to in San Francisco had a population of 200 kids on the days everyone showed up. Needless to say, we were a small school.

The kid smirks in his mugshot like a high school senior who got pulled over on the way to prom. Except with this kid, the police aren’t crashing a one-night party – they’re intervening in a yearslong bender.

Supporters of presidential candidate and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., encouraged UCLA students to register to vote Monday evening at a “Rock the Campus” event that was part of a larger series of college campus tours.

Editor’s note: A player’s year refers to his NCAA eligibility for next season. So a player who is a freshman in school this spring is called a sophomore because he will be a sophomore when the NCAA football regular season starts in fall.