A Sports Obsession Inspires a Career

By the time UW alumna Thuc Nhi Nguyen was in middle school, she had a regular afterschool routine. She would rush home to watch three sports-talk programs on TV: first Sports Center, then Around the Horn, and finally Pardon the Interruption.  And as she watched, she thought, “That’s what I want to do. I want to work in sports media.” 

She has never wavered from that goal.

Nguyen (BA, Communication, Mathematics, 2015) is now a sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times, covering the LA Lakers basketball team and the Olympics. Remembering her introduction to sports media as a middle schooler, she marvels at how far she’s come.

“One of the central figures on Around the Horn — an iconic ESPN show that just stopped airing last year — was Bill Plaschke, who’s a columnist with me at the LA Times,” Nguyen says. “For my money, he’s the best sports columnist in the whole country. I started watching him on TV when I was 12 or 13, and now I actually work with him every day. That’s very, very cool.”

Nguyen remembers the specific moment when sports became her life: October 23, 2005. She watched on TV as the Seattle Seahawks beat the Dallas Cowboys with a dramatic field goal in the final minute of the game.

“I thought, ‘This is it. This is the best thing anyone has ever shown me’,” she says. “From that point on, I was obsessed. Sports became my whole personality.”

Nguyen became a sports reporter for the student newspaper at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School and then joined the staff of The Daily, the UW student newspaper, as a sports reporter and editor. While at the UW, she also interned at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Times, Crosscut, and the Southern California News Group (SCNG).

After graduating, Nguyen was hired by SCNG as a beat reporter. She briefly covered professional soccer and then covered UCLA sports — primarily football, basketball, and gymnastics — for the LA Daily News, the OC Register, and other area papers. She found the transition to her first professional job seamless thanks to her time at The Daily.

“The Daily prepared me in incredible ways,” Nguyen says. “At the UW, I covered football practice every day and every home game, and when we were lucky, we got to travel to road games as well. I learned how to write a story every day, how to ask for interviews, and how to prepare for those interviews. So by the time I covered UCLA as my first beat full time, I was familiar with the cadence of college football. And with UCLA in the same conference as the UW, I was also very familiar with the team.”

In 2019, Nguyen moved to the Los Angeles Times, where she started as a general assignment reporter. She covered sports at UCLA and USC, and she helped with coverage of professional teams including the LA Lakers, LA Clippers, and LA Sparks. That led to a role as LA Chargers beat reporter, and more recently a new beat covering the Lakers. Given the visibility of the Lakers and the punishing schedule in professional basketball, this new position has been exciting and exhausting in equal measure.

“Covering the NBA is much harder than covering football,” Nguyen says. “There are way more games, and I travel to every game, including 41 games on the road. There have been times when I did not sleep two consecutive nights in my own bed for several weeks. And working at the LA Times, there needs to be a Lakers story every day. It’s hard, but it’s the thing I chose to do. And I get a lot of Delta [Airlines] points.”

Nguyen’s schedule will get even busier in February, when she and other LA Times reporters head to Italy to cover the 2026 Winter Olympics. It will be Nguyen’s third time covering the Olympics (after Beijing in 2022 and Paris in 2024), where she will write dozens of articles, some of them about sports that rarely get media attention.

“That’s one of the fun things about the Olympics — you get to learn about these insane sports, and the people who do them love telling you about them,” she says. “Just like I’ve dedicated my life to journalism, they’ve dedicated their life to bobsled or luge. So even if I don’t know the ins and outs of their specific sport, it’s such a joy to cover the Olympics because people are achieving their life’s goal. That type of story is transcendent of sports.”

In Paris, Nguyen also reported on a sport she knows well: gymnastics. She competed in gymnastics from grade school through high school and continues to take gymnastics classes as an adult, so Olympic gymnastics was one of her assigned beats — including a story that dissected a notoriously difficult vault perfected by Simone Biles. “That was my time to shine,” she says of the in-depth story.

Though Nguyen has many great memories from her Olympics reporting, one of the most memorable moments in her journalism career came not in Beijing or Paris but in Los Angeles, when LA Lakers superstar LeBron James broke the NBA’s all-time scoring record in February 2023 — a record that had been held by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for nearly 40 years.

“It was a big deal that that record stood for so long,” Nguyen says, “so we had all hands on deck when LeBron broke that record. I had a story on the front page of the sports section of the LA Times that night, and I remember thinking afterwards that in 40 years, if someone else breaks this record, people will look up this article that I wrote to know what it was like. That was a very cool realization and a humbling experience, to know that in this silly job I chose when I was 14 years old, I get the opportunity every day to potentially witness and record historic moments.”