Stone Freeman didn\u2019t come by his fascination with sports as a high school star.<\/p>\n
Sure, the Warwick, R.I.,<\/strong>resident played Little League baseball and rec basketball, but he was more of a \u201csoftball sibling,\u201d he says, spending a lot of his childhood traveling around New England with his family to watch his sisters play in tournaments.<\/p>\n \u201cGrowing up I was consumed with sports, but never exactly playing it,\u201d says Freeman. \u201cI watched a ton of baseball, listening to Don Orsillo, the Red Sox play-by-play guy. My thing, particularly in high school, was, if I can\u2019t get into an arena by playing, how can I? It\u2019s been by covering sports.\u201d<\/p>\n In his four years at the University of Rhode Island, Freeman has seen the inside of a lot of arenas, and as he graduates on May 19 with a degree in journalism, he will be leaving as the resonant voice listeners tuned to for men\u2019s basketball and football on student radio station WRIU.<\/p>\n But that just scratches the surface of a busy college career.<\/p>\n Along with doing play-by-play for WRIU, he\u2019s written for the student newspaper, The Good Five Cent Cigar, including serving as sports editor his junior year, and GoRhody.com, the athletic department\u2019s communications arm. For WRIU, he\u2019s broadcast men\u2019s basketball from three Atlantic-10 Tournaments and two NCAA Tournaments, and covered men\u2019s soccer in the first-round of the NCAA Tournament in East Hartford, Conn.<\/p>\n He\u2019s also wedged in internships with The Sport Hubs\u2019 Patriots Radio Network, \u201cThe Andy Gresh Show\u201d on WPRO and with the sports departments of ABC6 and WJAR-TV. That\u2019s not to mention starting his own sports podcast, available on iTunes and SoundCloud, which has had about 2,700 listeners, and stoking a Twitter account that\u2019s at more than 12,000 tweets (3,000 likes) and 1,200 followers.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s sports media world, he says, having your hand on many platforms is important. \u201cEverybody seems to flip to sports to see what\u2019s going on. When you have so many eyes on you, you have to be on as much as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n In the classroom, Freeman has also excelled, and will earn the Academic Excellence Award in journalism. Along with his broadcast classes, he credits the journalism curriculum for drilling in him the \u201cnuts and bolts of being a reporter.\u201d One of his favorite assignments gave him a chance to interview long-time Providence Journal sports columnist Bill Reynolds.<\/p>\n \u201cI asked him a ton of questions,\u201d says Freeman. \u201cI asked him what his favorite part of working in sports was and his answer is something I will carry with me the rest of my life \u2013 \u2018In sports and in journalism, you really get a chance to hear people\u2019s stories.\u2019 I think that\u2019s the best part.\u201d<\/p>\n The stories he\u2019s been able to tell his senior year would be exciting to any URI fan or sports journalist.<\/p>\n \u201cThis year was really cool,\u201d say Freeman. \u201cBasketball is our premier sport, but soccer went to the NCAA Tournament and I got to cover that. This has been our first winning season in football in 17 years, and I was right at the center of that.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it\u2019s also been a great year because of the people, in particular the people at the Harrington School of Communication and Media, but also down in the athletic department,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt\u2019s a real family feel. There are people who genuinely care about what I\u2019m doing and how I\u2019m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n His personal highs this school year could fill any highlight reel.<\/p>\n Over Christmas break, Freeman covered the Rams at a tournament in Hawaii \u2013 broadcasting three games for men\u2019s basketball\u2019s flagship station, B101-FM. He filled in for veteran broadcasters Steve McDonald and Don Kaull, and is thankful for the help McDonald offered as he prepped for the big-time assignment. Also, Freeman\u2019s family traveled to Hawaii, so he still got to spend the holidays with them.<\/p>\n But most of all, he felt the trip helped his transformation from being considered strictly a good student broadcaster.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that really stuck out the most about the trip was when I came back and there were people who felt I had surpassed that role,\u201d he says. \u201cThere were people who were like, \u2018Wait, this kid\u2019s a student?\u2019 That was rewarding to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n Another highlight was interning for the Patriots Radio Network and working beside two of his broadcasting idols \u2013 Scott Zolak and Bob Socci. Freeman worked in the studio in Dorchester, Massachusetts, every gameday, preseason in August through the Super Bowl in February. Along with basic intern tasks such as running phone lines and ordering food, he monitored the phone lines for callers, edited audio, and posted podcast interviews on social media.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Patriots play a lot of primetime games, which meant a lot of nights coming home from Boston at 2 in the morning,\u201d he says. \u201cI was still able to wake up at 9 the next morning to get to class. I just like the vibe of working in this field, getting home late, getting a couple hours of sleep and starting up again the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n And on Super Bowl Sunday, as the Patriots pulled out a 13-3 win over the Los Angeles Rams, Freeman was right there in the middle of it, in the studio.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was an awesome experience. Without that internship, I wouldn\u2019t have met so many connections and people that are really rooting for me. It made me realize how passionate I really am for what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n As he approaches graduation, Freeman is waiting to see what\u2019s next. Eventually, though, he\u2019d like to be in the booth doing play-by-play.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s the purest form of journalism,\u201d he says. \u201cSome people see a line between play-by-play and journalism, but to me it\u2019s the same thing. In journalism, you have to be truthful, you have to be the eyes and ears of people who aren\u2019t there. That\u2019s what play-by-play is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stone Freeman didn\u2019t come by his fascination with sports as a high school star.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1338,"featured_media":6997,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-student-profile"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1338"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}