By Robbie Hanratty

MA Broadcast Journalism student, Kevin Craigens opens up with his love for football growing up. I sat down with him to discuss everything from life growing up to his ambitions to be a full time football reporter.

Kevin is from Larkhall which is a town in south Lanarkshire, just 14 miles from Glasgow. Glasgow is of course famous for its football with the Celtic vs Rangers rivalry being talked about globally.

One of Kevins biggest influences in the world of sports journalism was the late Hugh McIlvanney, a Scottish sports journalist who had long stints with the The Observer and The Sunday Times. Kevin told me, “If I could at least be half as successful as he is, I’d be a happy man”

After doing some freelance work for several media outlets, Kevin now volunteers for Newmains United who were a junior football team but are now pile their trade in the West of Scotland League. For the past 18 months until the summer he was their Stats Man and produced articles previewing the forthcoming games.

Kevin also told me of how he found his passion to commence in his broadcast journalism masters at UWS. This was through getting highly praised for a written article as part of an assessment during a social science college course he was part of.

Kevin reporting outside Somerset Park, Ayr during a UWS Newsweek.

To the end of the interview I had a little fun challenging Kevin to some quickfire questions. Lets see how he got on.

Find out more about Kevins journey into journalism at:

Twitter- @KCraigens

LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-craigens-004270100