Where are they now? Alumni series spotlights team leader Peter Baugh

By Peter Baugh
Special to NBTB

The moment I walk into a stadium for the first time, I feel a rush. I soak in the smell of stale beer and peanuts and hot dogs. Fans seem hopeful — every game starts 0-0 — and the grass looks so green.

These are the moments I love sports the most.

Student Zach Berman (left foreground) and other NBTB journalists attend a San Francisco Giants game during NBTB 2017. Photo by NBTB staff.

As a team leader at NBTB in 2016, I took a group of campers to a San Francisco Giants game at AT&T Park. They wandered around the stadium, searched for story ideas and worked on their social media skills. It was my first time in that ballpark, and I couldn’t have been more content.

I sat in the upper deck as the game began. San Francisco Bay stretched in front of my eyes, and the sky turned orange as the sun faded. I was surrounded by dozens of happy kids.

Man, I thought. Life feels so good.

Journalism took me to AT&T Park that night, and it’s allowed me to visit some crazy places since my week at NBTB ended.

I’ve followed my love of sports writing from my home in Columbia, Missouri, to the depths of Death Valley (Louisiana State’s football stadium, not the crazy hot national park in the Southwest). I’ve walked between the hedges at Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia, and I’ve talked to gold medal swimmers at the FINA World Championships in Budapest.

Baugh reports on the Texas Bowl on Dec. 27, 2017 at NRG Stadium in Houston. The event was Missouri’s first bowl game in three years. Photo by Liv Paggiarino/Missourian/used with permission.

This past fall, I covered the University of Missouri football team for the Columbia Missourian. I went to 12 of the 13 games the Tigers played, filing stories from six different states. Each time I entered a stadium press box I felt the same rush I did when I was at the Giants game with my NBTB campers.

Working at the Missourian was a wonderful, stressful, maddening, tear-inducing, rewarding experience, and it showed me that this really is what I want to do with the rest of my life. I love conversations, sports and writing, and I get to combine all three in the work that I do.

As for what’s next: I will be working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this summer through the Rick Hummel Internship program, which funds a sports reporting internship for one University of Missouri student annually. I’ll be covering sports around St. Louis and will have the chance to write about baseball, my favorite sport. Then I will head back to the University of Missouri for my senior year.

Recently I learned that NBTB will be going to a Giants game again this summer. Though I’ll probably be working those nights, I’ll smile thinking of a new group of campers taking in baseball,  green grass and sunsets over San Francisco Bay.

Editor’s note: One in a series of stories on Newsroom by the Bay student and staff alumni.