Kathleen Ortiz grew up the daughter of two journalists, following them on assignments and dreaming of one day becoming a journalist herself. As a student at Rice University she joined the school paper, rising to editor-in-chief. But it wasn’t until a summer internship at the Dallas Morning News that she realized her heart was in the sports department.

Ortiz was sent to cover two Gold Cup matches on a tight deadline. “I was nervous,” she wrote in her application for a 2026 AWSM Scholarship Award. “I wanted this internship to help me decide which career path to pursue after college.”

That night, the press box felt like a natural fit. A few hours later, after surviving a post-match, mostly Spanish language news conference with the winning coaches (“I’m not a native speaker … I was exhausted.”) she filed her stories, made deadline and went home to crash. “I’ll never forget the way I felt when I woke up the next day,” she wrote AWSM. “I was exhilarated. I not only survived my first assignment, but I fell in love, and I couldn’t wait to do it again.”

That love for the game - that passion for sports journalism - is everywhere in the profiles of AWSM’s new scholarship class. The list includes Ortiz of Rice, Maddie Hartley from Northwestern, Liana Handler and Savannah Hernandez of the University of Florida, Anna Laible at the University of North Carolina and Elise Gan from the University of Iowa.

Laible, a junior in Chapel Hill, actually started her career at age 14, filing stories for Sports Illustrated Kids and then freelancing for MLB.com as its first teen reporter. Hernandez, now completing a masters program at Florida, was a credentialed journalist for the Women’s FIFA World Cup back in July-August 2023, filing for The Associated Press and USA Today. Gan, an Iowa junior, worked to become bilingual in a second language, Spanish, while also learning critical production skills like Adobe Premiere Pro and InDesign.

The impact of a fast-changing media landscape is evident in the skill sets of this year’s winners and the other outstanding applicants. Most not only write and edit for print, but podcast, embrace social media, appear on radio and TV and run behind-the-scenes production. Hartley knows digital pagination and has helped run the copy desk at the Kansas City Star. “This role has made me incredibly attentive to detail,” she noted in her own application.

These young women are shaped by personal experience. Handler, the granddaughter of Cuban immigrants, included in her entry clips of an article she had written for the Baltimore Banner about the death of Luis Guevara, a young Orioles minor leaguer from Venezuela, in a watercraft accident. She wrote about Guevara’s own immigrant journey to the United States and the impact his death had on a friend, Andrés Torres of the Tampa Bay Rays.“Beautiful article,” commented one Banner reader. “Thank you for sharing.”

Many of the applicants have taken active roles in AWSM chapters at their schools. Laible is co-founder of the UNC chapter, AWSM’s newest, because she understands the significance of paying forward what the women who came before her started. After meeting Christine Brennan, AWSM’s first president, Laible reached out for advice. She was struck by Brennan’s resiliency while breaking news stories around athletes Jordan Chiles and Caitlin Clark. When told that UNC would be taking some reporters to the Paris 2024 Olympics but that competition would be fierce, Laible drew on that lesson.

“I used that motivation to be resilient like I had learned from Christine,” she said.

Laible was the only freshman selected to go to Paris.