The Beatless Beat Writer: Daily Routine

Joey Blackwell quickly discusses his daily routine and how things have changed since the pandemic

Today is crazy, so apologies in advance for the shortness of today's post,

What does your daily routine look like?

I myself am a creature of habit. This can be a very good thing at times, but it also has its downfalls.

Prior to the outbreak, my routine remained fairly consistent. I would start every morning around 7 a.m. by waking up and perusing social media for about 10 minutes to wake up and to see if there was anything that happened overnight in the world of sports that I missed.

Lately, I’ve never missed anything.

After a quick shower and preparation for the day, I would begin school or work or whatever activities I had planned for the day. For a journalist, a schedule is never really set in stone, so this is constantly updating. On some days, this means that I wrap up at 3 p.m. Others, I can work well into the night.

This constant flux of scheduling and a different lineup of work every day didn’t sit well with me at first as I entered the sports journalism industry, but I feel that I have slowly adapted to it fairly well. However, the bad part of being such a devotee to tight schedules is that if a metaphorical wrench is thrown into the mix, then that ability to adapt becomes fairly difficult.

Enter COVID-19.

Since the start of the pandemic, routine for me has become all but extinct. Every day presents new challenges. Between all of my courses shifting to online work and my job as a sports writer, routine has all but dissolved from my life.

As a person of habit, this has not gone well. In addition to an up-in-the-air schedule, lately I have been experiencing terrible sleep patterns, which has been detrimental.

So what does this have to do with sports?

For me, I’m starting to reach my breaking point.

I need sports back. Alabama football, primarily. With such a lack of daily news coming out of the sports world, it’s been rough.

That’s why I’m so excited for the NFL draft.

As you are probably already aware, the NFL draft starts this upcoming Thursday. Finally, for the first time since early March, we are going to have an actual live sporting event to watch and enjoy.

I’ve watched NFL drafts in the past, but this year is different. This year, the draft serves as a bastion of normalcy in an otherwise shifty world. While the draft is being conducted in unconventional ways due to the coronavirus, it will still be an entertaining product to watch. Some mock drafts have as many as six former Alabama players going in the first round, a prospect that will make this year’s draft memorable in other ways aside from its format.

To sum it all up, I am very grateful for the NFL draft this year. While I might not have appreciated it to its full potential in years past, the content that it has and will provide to the sports media and fans of the NFL is something we can all be excited about.

It’ll be nice to get back into some sort of routine, even if it is only temporary.

The Beatless Beat Writer is a series of stories by BamaCentral's own Joey Blackwell. The series is meant to reflect on and discuss Alabama athletics and its fans in Tuscaloosa during the current pandemic.