Brendan Quinn ’01

Brendan Quinn ’01 has been making a name for himself as one of the top writers for the sports news website The Athletic. He began his career covering college basketball, and he currently serves as president of the United States Basketball Writers Association. A few years ago, he had the opportunity to cover the PGA tour, and soon, he will be in Italy to cover the prestigious Ryder Cup, where the best players from the United States compete against the best from Europe. Recently, Alumni Prep Update caught up with Quinn to talk about his career.

BQ: I started covering golf in 2019. I had done college basketball and a variety of other things for years before oddly falling into covering golf. The Athletic was still pretty young at the time; nobody was covering golf and the college hoops offseason gave me the opportunity to try it. My first major was the PGA Championship at Bethpage that Brooks Koepka won, and I've been doing it ever since then. My first Ryder Cup was at Whistling Straits two years ago, but this will be my first time covering it abroad. And in Rome — you can’t really beat that.

BQ: The transition into golf has been fascinating. I was always a golf fan. I grew up playing at Cobbs Creek. I was in eighth grade in 1997 when Tiger Woods won the Masters. Golf had its moment then and that's really why I got into it; although unfortunately, I wasn’t good enough to make the team at the Prep. In my 20s and 30s I basically had lapsed on the game for a few years. I was bouncing around jobs and ended up moving to Tennessee. The clubs were always with me, but rarely actually used. But being in Southeast Michigan now I’ve picked it back up more. And when my bosses at The Athletic said, “We would love for you to try to expand your role and do more. We like your feature writing; how can you do more in the summer?” my love of the game really drove me to propose the option of writing about it. I went from covering college basketball at Michigan and Michigan State as a beat writer, where you’re only really around one team, to adding golf in the off-season, and then I became a national college basketball writer. It’s certainly been a weird progression, but golf lends itself to good storytelling and good writing. As they say, “The smaller the ball, the better the story.”

BQ: I left Philly in 2011 to go to Tennessee to chase this career, and to this day, some of my closest friends are guys from the Class of 2001. We still have our group chat going, where inevitably there is more banter and football discussion than actual life updates. But in all seriousness, the Prep means everything to me. I struggled a lot as a student. I needed a place like the Prep and the people there who took an interest in me as someone who wanted to write and tell stories, but lacked the confidence academically. People like Jason Zazyczny ’90, Chris Rupertus P ’24, ’26, and Tony Braithwaite ’89 helped me get through the Prep despite many classes being a real challenge. The Prep means a lot to my family as well. My dad (Kevin ’58), both of my brothers (Kevin ’85 and Sean ’89), my uncle (Frank ’63), my nephew (Declan ’18), two great-uncles (Fr. James Flaherty ’32 and Fr. Joseph Flaherty ’34), and a few cousins are all grads. I always wanted to go to the Prep as a kid. So for me, as someone who didn’t feel like I could cut it, to be made to feel comfortable and to be given the opportunity to progress meant a lot.

BQ: That’s a tough question. As a reporter, you find yourself in these incredible places and think, “Why? Why am I here?” I was in Vegas when Connecticut advanced to the Final Four and found myself in a side locker room postgame with [UConn Head Coach] Dan Hurley and [Dan’s father and legendary high school coach] Bob Hurley, Sr., who were sharing this big, emotional father-son moment. I was invited in and got to sit there and share that experience. That's the stuff that stays with you. 

Covering the Masters is, of course, pretty extraordinary as well. My name was pulled in the 2022 media raffle and I played Augusta National the day after Scottie Scheffler's win. It was another pinch-me moment. 

At this point, I've covered 10 or so Final Fours, probably 15 majors, a bunch of NCAA Tournaments, and all of it does start to run together. Covering games and tournaments is great, but I think the job is more about the characters that you get to cover and the stories you get to tell. Covering John Beilein and Tom Izzo at the peak of their Michigan/Michigan State rivalry and having both coaches open their doors to me. Those players who come from difficult places and do extraordinary things. Spending six months getting to know Rose Zhang. Telling Smylie Kauffman's story — his rise, crash, and return as a broadcaster — and those golfers like Harry Higgs and Joel Dahmen who take the long road. 

The last highlight of my career I’ll mention is being one of the first employees at The Athletic. When I joined, there was a lot of skepticism. They had mainly hired people who had been laid off from other places, but I had a decent job covering college hoops for the statewide outlet in Michigan. So I left a job to go to this startup, and people thought it was crazy. I knew it was a risk, but it sounded like something that I wanted to be a part of. Fast forward to January 2022, and we got acquired by the New York Times for $500 million. The company has hundreds of writers and is huge in the UK. It's a brand people know. Getting to this point from the early days of having to start phone calls by explaining what The Athletic actually was, and counting each single new subscriber is something I’m really proud of.

BQ: I would like to think it's the stories that I have tried to pursue — genuine stories that show how we can all relate to these people who are doing things that none of us could do, whether that be athletically, coaching in front of 70,000 people, or sinking a putt with a million people watching. I focus on humanizing these people and making them relatable. Usually, it's something that shows their vulnerability, whether it's their backstory or the way they feel, think, or act, or the beliefs they have or don’t have in themselves. That's what I've always tried to key in on. I'm not the X's and O's guy. I'm not a columnist who writes my opinions about this and that. 

Occasionally I'll write a column here and there, but I'm way more heavily involved in highlighting the human aspect through features and profile stories. I think that's why I was a natural fit at The Athletic, because that's what they have long strived for — telling those types of stories. I remember growing up and wanting to get my Sports Illustrated to go read Michael Bamberger or Frank Deford, and being so amazed by their work. That's what I always wanted. 

BQ: I will arrive in Rome the Saturday before. That Sunday, I’ll go walk the course and see it for the first time. Once the event begins, I really just follow the story. I might cover a single match one day or there could be a controversy to cover. It’s really the beauty of the job: once you get there, you have no idea what is going to unfold. It's total randomness, and it’s always a great challenge trying to guess where you should be to get the story. There’s only so much you can plan. For example, at the last Ryder Cup when every American player had scored at least a point, I felt the story had to mention each player. So I sat on the sixth green at Whistling Straits, watched every group come in, and wrote about every player through the snapshot of them coming across that green. I came up with that story idea at 8 a.m. that morning. You just have to trust your instincts. 

BQ: Be as active as possible; put yourself out there. I wish I would have done more. I don’t remember the state of the school paper at the time, but I wish I'd been more involved in it. If you want to write, you have to start writing. 

There's a big difference between today and when I went to school, in terms of accessibility to alumni. In 2001, you couldn't search a name online, find a Twitter page, and shoot a member of the media a DM. Today any young man who is interested in sports writing could reach out to me, or any number of the many Prep alums doing amazing stuff in journalism. It's fantastic. All these people are accessible to the students now, and we all have the passion for the Prep. College students and classes reach out all the time, and I love to help, but if someone from the Prep reached out, I’d bend over backward simply because of what the place means and I know the kind of people that it produces. So my advice to students is to not only think about your connection to the Prep in the here and now as a student, but also to realize how many people are out there that will go above and beyond to try to help out. Take advantage of that.

 

My last bit of advice to anyone interested in sports writing is to read, and read with both purpose and curiosity. Try to understand the structure and the tempo and the theme. More importantly, try to understand why it moves you. Then try to do the same.