O’s manager motivates aspiring sports reporters

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Rebecca James reports on a new sports journalism initiative…

The Orient boss Fabio Liverani spent time with students from the community project ‘Supporter to Reporter’ in the Matchroom Stadium last week.

The S2R students are currently a group of George Mitchell School and Buxton School pupils taking part in a 10-week programme that includes a celebration event at the end as well as a matchday experience with the opportunity to act as press at an O’s home game. The main aim of the project is to boost the motivation, confidence and self-esteem of the participants as they enhance their speaking and listening and writing skills through becoming sports reporters, receiving training and hands-on experience as they put their skills into practice in a challenging real-world context.

Of course, the O’s manager is used to dealing with the press, so he offered to give the students some practice. They asked him a number of questions whilst one student filmed the interviews.

At the end of the session, Liverani specifically asked to give some words of advice to the aspiring reporters, telling them: “Even in difficult times, if you have a dream, you should never let anyone kill that dream!”

Andree Selner, Delivering Opportunities Manager for the Leyton Orient Trust, said: “The S2R For Success Leyton reporters did a fantastic job of interviewing the manager – focusing questions on his past career, his time with Leyton Orient now and his hopes for the future. It was a fantastic opportunity for them to interview the manager of Leyton Orient as their first experience of interviewing a guest and they did a very professional job. Fabio was very generous with his time and we would all like to thank him and his interpreters for their time.”

She added: “The group learnt some invaluable lessons about how to stage a group interview and especially about capturing audio as well as video in case of poor sound quality!”

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