- Working on a book about mixed martial arts.

- Writing about women’s soccer and a few other topics for espnW and ESPN.

- Writing about MMA for USA TODAY.

- Contributing to USA TODAY’s magazine specials.

- Blogging at SportsMyriad and Mostly Modern Media. SportsMyriad includes the ambitious 2012 Olympic medal projections.

The blog SportsMyriad.com will get a bit of a makeover in September. Stay tuned.

I’m still freelancing for USA TODAY, and I’ve had few pieces published at ESPN.com and The Huffington Post. Some of my most interesting work will be print-only — USA TODAY publishes magazines on special topics, and I’ve gone beyond the sports world for my most recent assignments.

That’s plenty to keep me busy, and I still plan to work up a new book proposal early this fall. I can still take occasional freelance assignments on soccer, MMA, Olympic sports and anything else in the sports world, depending on my schedule at a given time. Try me at duresport (AT) gmail

I learned plenty and met people I’ll never forget, but it was a good time to go. I left after the Vancouver Games, for which I was the Nordic/biathlon beat writer after being called in to take over the online prep work with three months to go. I have other projects I want to pursue, and I hope to continue the most enjoyable part of my job — writing — as a freelancer.

The rest of my agenda, in no particular order:

• My new blog, sportsmyriad.com
• More family time
• Promoting my book, Long-Range Goals, The Success Story of Major League Soccer
• Working on another book, likely comparing sports fans across cultures and generations
• Starting a blog not related to sports. Details tba and tentative
• Freelancing elsewhere

If you want to hire me as a freelancer but failed to catch any of my writing for the national newspaper and its Web site, you might want to check out my work portfolio.

A few highlights, not necessarily the very best of my work (others can judge that) but offering a wide sampling:

• Feature with video: Mixed martial arts fighters often play a weighing game
• Feature with video: Women’s jumpers still hoping for flight in 2010 Games
• Feature with multimedia: Eight venues, one day: An Olympic odyssey
• Feature with unexpected interviews: Iceland eyes gold medal in handball
• Feature/scene piece: At Whistler, there’s just no party like a biathlon party
• Feature: Refs face tough calls in mixed martial arts
• Feature: Fighters’ entrance music gets brawlers in the mood
• Feature: On the field, Landon Donovan is showing a lot of game
• Feature: Maykel Galindo’s road from Cuba to Chivas USA
• Event story: Demong, Spillane give USA 1-2 finish in Nordic combined
• Game story: Weight lifted with U.S. soccer victory, gold
  
• Game story: Donovan answers D.C. fans’ taunts in 5-2 Galaxy win
• Interview: Clausen walking tall to third Olympics
• Interview: Wit keeps serious swimmers in sync
• Column: USA is a legitimate, if peculiar, soccer nation
• Column: The world’s game is needed more than ever

First part of the e-mail address is duresport. Then gmail.

The answer isn’t simple, which I why I’ve prepared this narrative as a companion to the simple work history presented in my resume. If you’re not interested in the whole story, the short answer is that my versatility has allowed me to hop between several career tracks in journalism. I’m an experienced editor and writer, a former page designer and an early adopter on the Web. I’m one of the few people to make the jump from print to Web, then back to print, then back to the Web. My experience is nothing if not diverse: covering high school basketball in rural North Carolina, designing the syndicated “That’s Racin’” NASCAR page, doing live election coverage in the early days of the Web, coordinating coverage of the Winter Olympics from Salt Lake City, researching a graduate thesis on new media, writing a soccer column that ensures an entertaining stream of e-mail to my inbox and jumping on the emerging sport of mixed martial arts.

Here’s the long version:

As I went through my undergraduate years at Duke, I wound up spending more and more time working for The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper. As arts editor my junior year, I re-organized the paper’s sporadic coverage into a twice-weekly section with a full calendar. By my senior year, I virtually lived at the office. I spent a semester as managing editor, guided newcomers through their first assignments, edited the monthly magazine supplement Currents and wrote for every section.

A rational mentor would have talked me into going to law school or graduate school, most likely in music. Fortunately, no such mentor existed. Though I had no professional experience and no journalism professors to recommend me for top jobs, I chased every newspaper lead I could find in the shaky economy of 1991.

I landed on the copy desk of the Morning Star in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I did all the basic desk tasks: editing stories, writing headlines, designing pages and picking wire stories. Thanks to a hiring freeze, I wound up as a stopgap assistant city editor at the tender age of 22. After 18 months, I moved to the sports section. Desk work was still my main responsibility, but in a department of five, I had ample opportunity to write a column and the occasional game story.

After three years in Wilmington, I was ready to move on to a newspaper I’d long admired, the News & Record in Greensboro. Here, I learned much more about page design, which gave me a chance to work in both the news and sports sections. Once again, I took on management duties, scheduling shifts for my co-workers and supervising the editorial assistants.

By 1995, I had joined the ad hoc team that ran the newspaper’s first foray into the Internet. The next year, the paper put together a full-fledged Web site, and I was hired as coordinating producer.

We were one of the fortunate newspaper site staffs given the freedom to do more than a simple rehashing of the print version. We took turns writing a column about the Internet for the paper, and we helped local groups and businesses develop their sites within our virtual community. I did live scene coverage under primitive circumstances, wandering around during an election or a golf tournament while making frequent trips back to the office or media tent. Best of all, I put together original material to cover local sports teams with “Carolina” in their names: Panthers (NFL), Hurricanes (NHL), Dynamo (A-League soccer).

Being in Greensboro also gave me the chance to commute each week to my alma mater, Duke, to work on a master’s degree in liberal studies. I broadened my education in a series of interdisciplinary courses in environmental studies, education, political science, history and sociology. I constantly sought to relate my classes to journalism and often wrote term papers combining my work interests and academic pursuits.

In 1998, I was ready to move on. More importantly, I was engaged, and we were ready to move somewhere near Washington. My fiancee landed a job first, and I moved up with her to find a job. To my surprise, I ended up back in print, designing and editing a daily page of national and world news for Knight Ridder Tribune News Service (now McClatchy-Tribune). The page was canceled after six weeks, and I moved on to the weekly “That’s Racin’” page of auto racing news, along with other design projects and regular shifts on the news desk. Here, I started a weekly column on Major League Soccer and wrote a few pieces on the Women’s World Cup in 1999. I also continued my graduate studies, doing an independent study on the history of objectivity in American journalism. All this, of course, was balanced with my wedding plans.

A year later, I was back on the Web at USATODAY.com, where I helped to develop the site’s interactive features. We started with message boards and moved on to chats. I continued to write a soccer column and filled in for the paper’s soccer writer when the MLS playoffs overlapped with the 2000 Summer Olympics. I also helped the Web site with its coverage of the Sydney Games, creating a tough two-month stretch in which I was doing three very different jobs. Meanwhile, I finished my graduate studies with a thesis on the changing role of journalists in new media. (The thesis is available online.)

When it was over, the sports department needed me more than the interactive department. I was asked to take over coverage of Olympic sports and soccer while also taking supervisory shifts and continuing to write my column.

The exciting job of planning Olympic coverage, a crucial task for USA TODAY, grew more difficult as the economy went sour. The staff was reorganized one month before the Games, and golf was added to my plate.

My immediate task was to keep our Salt Lake City coverage on track despite all the changes at the site. A couple of months later, I was responsible for our coverage of the World Cup, though I did not travel with the newspaper staff to Korea.

More changes came in August 2002. I took over our hockey coverage and gave up golf.

In 2004, I cut my hours to spend more time with my baby. My job for the first eight months was to build our coverage of the Athens Olympics. I worked with designers and programmers to get our site and the results feed in order. I also developed original content such as the Olympic Athlete of the Week awards, the 10.0 series of athlete interviews, brief bios on U.S. athletes and introductions to each sport.

After the Olympics, I moved into a role developing projects and original content for all sports. For the better part of a year, I worked on an overhaul of our automated feeds, which segued neatly into development of the results feed for the Torino Olympics. I went to Torino to do live coverage by blog.

I didn’t take a second trans-Atlantic trip for the World Cup, but I still blogged about the event. (Sadly, the archives for Torino and the World Cup were wiped out.)

I spent the next 18 months focused on our new general sports blog, Sports Scope, while contributing features to USA TODAY’s soccer coverage.

(For updates since 2008, when things got really interesting, check the rest of my site.)