During her time at St. Joe’s, Mia Messina ’25 served as the sports editor for The Hawk and a sports desk intern for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For the second year in a row, Messina earned first place for a sports story at the 2025 College Keystone Media Awards. Messina earned a bachelor’s degree in English and communications and a minor in journalism.
After four years of sports writing, Messina is working as a freelance journalist and photographer. Messina accepted a position to be a researcher for NBC Sports to cover the Milano Cortina Olympics from Feb. 6-22.
The Hawk sat down with Messina to learn more about her sports journalism work.
What do you enjoy most about covering sports?
The storylines behind it. It’s way more than statistics and wins and losses. There’s really such a human aspect to every game, match, meet, whatever.
What’s your favorite Winter Olympics event?
Definitely hockey, which is what I’m covering, which is really exciting. But if you’re going more traditional, I’d say figure skating.
What does your job covering the Olympics for NBC entail?
I work the 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. It would be watching whatever game’s on, maybe medal alerts during the medal games, injury updates. If anyone has a question, it’s our job to research it and get them the answer. It’s a lot of fact checking, researching and staying up to date on what’s happening in that sport.
Where will you be based?
Stanford, Connecticut, at the NBC headquarters.
What goes into researching your stories for the Games?
It’s a lot of being aware. It’s really important to be both an expert and a fan of the sport because you want to be an expert who can answer any question, but you also want to approach it from a fan standpoint. I think that’s the basis for everything and making sure you’re finding the good stories.
Is there a particular moment at the Games you’re most excited to cover?
Both the gold medal matches for the men’s and women’s team.
If you could give your younger self one piece of advice about becoming a sports journalist, what would it be?
I would tell myself to go for it more and not be afraid to do things scared. When I was first starting out, I was really afraid of a lot of things and afraid of getting things wrong. As I’ve grown up and done this for a little bit now, I realize that that’s kind of how you learn the most. I’d tell myself to not be afraid to make mistakes.
