By Julia Mericle
News Assignment Editor
Rachel Axon, an investigative reporter for USA Today sports media group, said it was her time at Bonaventure that shaped her career.
Axon’s success in the sports journalism field earned her recognition as the 2015 recipient of the John Domino Award. The award was presented on Monday, April 13 at the John Domino Award Dinner in The Regina A. Quick Center Loft. The ceremony was part of the biennial Dick Joyce Sports Symposium.
The John Domino award is presented to an outstanding St. Bonaventure graduate who has excelled in the sports communication field.
John Domino, who graduated from St. Bonaventure in ’84, played a large part in expanding the university’s broadcast department. He proceeded to work for NBC Sports, ESPN and Empire Sports Network before losing his life to cancer in 1994.
The symposium is held in honor of Dick Joyce, ’60, an Associated Press sportswriter who passed away in 1988.
Sister Margaret Carney, O.S.F., university president, began the event by speaking about the importance of athletics to the university community.
“I would like to suggest that tonight we are surrounded by reminders of why athletics can both inspire and motivate and form generations of men and women because of its inherent goodness as a constituent of becoming a full human person,” Sister Margaret said.
After graduation, Axon, ’06, covered high school sports in North Carolina for four years and collegiate athletics for two years at the University of Florida. She has been an investigative reporter for USA Today sports since 2012.
“Rachel Axon represents exactly what the John Domino Award recognizes,” Pauline Hoffmann, dean of the Russel J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said. Hoffmann said she did not have the pleasure of knowing Axon as a student, as Axon graduated immediately before Hoffmann became dean in 2012. However, Hoffmann shared the words of other journalism and mass communication professors who did work with Axon.
“In the constellation of bright stars that have come through here, Rachel shines among the very brightest,” Christopher Mackowski, a journalism and mass communication professor who had Axon in one of her first and last classes at Bonaventure, said.
When given a chance to speak about her award, Axon took the audience back to Bonaventure in 2003. She told the story of Jamil Terrell, a transfer student and member of the men’s basketball team, who came into the university with a welding certificate from Coastal Georgia Community College. Officials at the university were notified this certificate was not equivalent to an Associate’s degree, an NCAA requirement for transfer students. However, Terrell was not removed as ineligible.
Ultimately, those involved in the scandal lost their jobs and Terrell was declared ineligible.
During this time, Axon was a freshman sports writer for The Bona Venture.
“As a student, as a Bonnie, those were some of the darkest days and some of the toughest times I can remember on campus,” Axon said. “As a journalist, it was eye-opening, and now I could say the most formative experience I had [at Bonaventure] outside of the classroom.”
Amidst the scandal, Axon followed a lead to get information that another men’s basketball player, Calvin Brown, was planning to transfer.
According to Axon, The Bona Venture was competing with bigger media outlets like the Olean Times Herald, The Buffalo News and ESPN to report on the story first.
“It was my first scoop, and while it was ultimately a small part of the greater coverage we did that week, it was an adrenaline rush like nothing I had ever felt before,” Axon said.
Axon also said she felt this same pride when she completed her first professional investigative journalism piece on a high school athletic building that administrators had let students and coaches use for nearly 18 months after it was sentenced to be demolished.
According to Axon, there is not a day in her career that goes by that she does not think of all she learned from her professors at Bonaventure.
