The life of a sports insider may seem glamorous, but in reality it can be anything but. Stadium’s college basketball insider JEFF GOODMAN knows all too well how quickly things can get out of hand, whether it be having to leave a nice dinner out at a restaurant to cover a GRAYSON ALLEN tripping incident, or stopping his dog from barking at the mailman during a live TV hit. Goodman caught up with THE DAILY to tell us about his crazy schedule and how he tries to stay on top of it all. “Anybody who’s a news breaker, we’re tied to our phones. It sucks in a way, it’s frustrating for our families, and that’s the hardest part -- the balance between family and being good at your job. You want to do it all, and it’s kind of impossible.”
5:45-6:45am: My wife MELISSA gets up with our dog KASEY every morning, and I love her for it, cause the dog gets up early. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper, but the dog will get up around 5:15-5:30, and my wife will almost always get up with the dog. My daughter TALIA, who is a freshman in high school, gets up around 5:45 and it takes her a while to get ready now, do her hair and all that. She goes to a school that’s about half an hour away and she usually takes the train, so when I’m home and not travelling I’ll take her to the train pretty much every day.
6:45-7:45am: After I drop her off, I’ll come home and get Kasey, who is a 9-and-a-half-year-old lab mix that still thinks she is 2 years old and wants to run all the time and chase the ball. I’m in Boston so it’s cold now, but when the weather is nice I’ll take her to the beach that’s 10 minutes away. Right now it’s the park, and when the snow hits, that’s it. I’ll throw the ball around with her for 15-20 minutes, then I’ll come back and grab an iced coffee and breakfast. We just got a treadmill, so I will try to get on that if I can in the morning for 20 minutes while I’m watching “SPORTSCENTER.” Even though I’m not at ESPN I still love watching those guys.
8:00-10:00am: I’ll get to my desk and start looking back at what happened the night before. Twitter is the best dissemination of information. If you follow the right people on Twitter, you never have to go to a website and scour. I’ll have an email in the morning waiting for me from JEFF COLLIER, who is the producer of the 10:00am ET show that we do called “THE TERRITORY” going over what the topics are for the day. The biggest difference with Stadium vs. what I did with ESPN is that I get to express my opinion. I also might make a couple phone calls to coaches before I go on to get some info, whether it’s newsy or it’s something that lets me advance something.
Goodman (l) and his family live in Newburyport, Mass., about 45 minutes from BostonJEFF GOODMAN
10:00am-12:15pm: I’ll be on air and taping segments for the show, but in between hits, I’m working the phones as much as humanly possible, I’m calling people and I’m texting people. The one thing with me that’s really helped me is coming up, I started by doing recruiting, so I have a different network than a lot of other people. I can call college coaches, but I can also call AAU coaches, I can call players if I need to.
12:15-1:00pm: I live in Newburyport, Mass., north of Boston about 45 minutes and right on the water. I’ll go downtown and get lunch, get a sandwich, just to get out. It’s a cool downtown, and when I’m home I’m in the house all day, so I want to get the hell out a couple times.
1:00-5:30pm: I’ll sometimes bring lunch back and get back to work. I’m writing this series now called “Chain of Command” where every week I’m polling coaches from each league in the country to determine the best and worst jobs in every league. I have a master coaches contact bible that literally has 340 teams, every coach’s cell phone number and every SID’s cell phone number, so if anything breaks, and I even have a junior college one too, I’m going to have three or four numbers that I can go to.
5:30-7:00pm: I’m still going strong typically until my daughter gets back from school around 5:30. At that point I’ll watch the news, have some dinner with her and my wife.
7:00-9:00pm: Everyone laughs at me, but I have two TVs in the main living room. Part of it was so I could watch two games at once, but part was also that I was in a room watching basketball while my wife and daughter were in other rooms. Now they can watch the show they want and I’ll watch a game without sound, which happens a good amount.
9:00pm-12:30am: In season I’ll have games on and I’m up really late watching. I’m pretty good in the offseason of watching whatever my wife wants. My nights, it’s not really a job because I’m watching ball, it’s not hard, but even if you don’t want to watch, it’s pretty hard not to in case something happens. If something happens, I’m on the phone late at night, or I’ll send a bunch of texts out if I know I won’t be able to get ahold of a coach that night. I’m a Pac-12 guy -- I went to school at Arizona -- so I’m one of those guys that really likes to stay up to watch West Coast basketball.
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