Prior to last Saturday, I had never attended a sporting event in the Southeastern Conference. Indeed, prior to taking a quick driving tour around the Mississippi State campus last Thursday, I had never even stepped foot on an SEC campus.

I’ve been lucky enough to live throughout the United States in my 25 years. So much so that I struggle to answer the usually-simple question, “Where are you from?”

I was born in Chicago and lived in the suburbs there until I was 10, easily long enough to resign myself to a mostly-painful life of Cubs, Bears and Bulls fandom. My family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area before I started fifth grade, just in time for the Giants to win the World Series three times in five years while the Cubs waited until I was a high school senior to win their first title in more than a century.

As much as I enjoyed my time in California, I always felt a pull to come back to Chicago, and the city’s sports teams were a big part of that. The chance to study at a top-notch journalism school with legions of alumni in the professional ranks certainly didn’t hurt.

Until high school, I thought I was a math person — in fact, my love of sports initially grew out of my love of numbers and statistics. Sure, I read the sports section each day, but it was mostly for the box scores, stat tables and listings of upcoming matchups. It wasn’t until much later that I began viewing sports through the stories of the people who played them, and the idea that I could be the one to tell those stories began appealing to me more and more.

At Northwestern University, I was able to do just that with the Wildcats’ football, basketball and softball teams, among others. Softball, in particular, became my niche and area of expertise, and led to freelance work, an internship with a professional team, a newsletter I wrote throughout one spring and even a foray into bracketology.

My first post-graduate job took me to northern New England, where I covered Dartmouth College and the Ivy League as well as high schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. I learned a lot there and told some really impactful stories about the local athletes and coaches, from a deep dive into the state of girls’ and women’s sports in the area for the 50th anniversary of Title IX to a profile of a high school track and field athlete who needed and received a heart transplant.

Still, I missed the energy and adrenaline rush that only big-time athletics can give me. And so after having lived in the Midwest, on the West Coast and in the Northeast, I’m excited to have landed here in the Deep South to experience a place that, from what I’ve heard, truly lives and breathes college sports.

Chicago and San Francisco, simply put, are pro sports towns. Sure, I was around the Big Ten in college — covering football games at Wisconsin and Nebraska were two of the coolest sports environments I’ve been in — and went to plenty of Pac-12 games (rest in peace) at Stanford. But as soon as I arrived in Starkville, I could tell right away that everything revolved around gameday.

All the big box stores sell Mississippi State gear. Everyone around town always seems to be wearing an MSU shirt, hat or both, no matter what day of the week it is. Half an hour before kickoff Saturday, at a stadium that wasn’t even full, I thought my eardrums might burst from all the cowbells. It immediately became clear to me how deep this passion runs. Down here, it really does, as they say, just mean more.

That means, of course, that I have an important responsibility to keep Bulldogs fans informed and knowledgeable about their teams. It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly, because it hasn’t even taken me a week to learn how much this means to all of you.

I still have much to learn on this beat, but I’m grateful The Dispatch has trusted me, a total newcomer to the South, to help tell the stories of Mississippi State athletics. I know I’ll have to work to earn that same trust from MSU fans across the state and beyond, but I promise I will put as much effort into covering your favorite teams as you all do into supporting them.