HSE Senior Lands Writing Gig Covering the Los Angeles Clippers
Writer & Photographer Demi Lawrence
It started with a Christmas gift, a personal television for then 12-year old Garrett Chorpenning’s room. One night while his parents were watching their own show downstairs, Garrett decided to go upstairs and watch something on his own.
“I’d always played basketball, but I was never really big into the NBA,” says Chorpenning, laptop decked out with stickers in front of him. “The first game I saw that was on TV was an LA Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies game, it was a playoff game. And ever since then, I’ve been a Clippers fan.”
Fast forward to August of 2016, HSE senior Garrett has a lot to say about the Clippers but no way to share and portray his thoughts with others. Bored and hungry to mix his passions for writing and the Clippers together, ClippersChor was born. A mixture of the team and his last name, Garrett wrote around 15 posts a month on ClippersChor from August until early February.
“I wrote mainly game summaries, just giving my opinion about what happened in the game and where the team would go from there,” Garrett said. “I followed a writer for the Clippers, Dan Woike, for a while. And I thought, ‘If he can do it, why can’t I?’”
While scrolling through his Twitter feed one day, Garrett saw a tweet that would change the whole game for him and his passion for the Clippers. A FanSided website, Clipperholics, covers the Clippers, and they put out a tweet that they were accepting new contributor writer applications.
“The application process was pretty simple, basically I just gave them my general information about how old I was, where I was from,” Garrett says. “They asked for some of my previous work and why I was interested, and I heard back the next day from them.”
In all, there are seven contributors for Clipperholics, including Garrett. The editor is from Virginia, some contributors from LA, and there are even two contributors from London, England. An international affair, this site puts out anywhere from 55 to 70 stories each month. Do the math, and that’s somewhere around seven posts a month for Garrett, which is nearly half of what he was doing for his own personal blog.
“Clipperholics is a lot less writing but a lot more in depth,” Garrett says. “I’m still giving the same amount of effort, if not more than when I was writing for my own blog. With my past experiences and what I have learned from the guys at Clipperholics, my work has gotten a lot better and more fluid.”
Garrett will be attending Ball State University in the fall to study Sports Communications. He wishes to continue to write for Clipperholics into college and hopefully start to get paid for his work in the distant future.
“If I do well enough, I could move up and keep on writing. I would love to keep writing about the Clippers in general, if not with Clipperholics.” Garrett says. “I love the team, and I love writing. I feel like I’ve discovered a true passion with it last August with ClippersChor, and I’ve continued with that passion into Clipperholics.”
To read some of Garrett’s stories visit clipperholics.com.
