The Daily Emerald (2023-present)
I started as a sports writer with The Daily Emerald before my freshman year. For two years, I balanced marching band with covering football, acrobatics and tumbling and basketball. As a junior, I was promoted to sports associate editor, where I continued to cover football and acro while working with head editor Jack Lazarus and assisting in print planning, story editing and desk communication and management.
In 2025-26, I traveled as the desk's football beat reporter to cover Oregon football's away games at Penn State and Washington, and its College Football Playoff run through the Orange and Peach Bowls.
This page includes my best digital stories. More are linked under the more feature work tab, and are continually updated on the Daily Emerald website.
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Tony Tuioti’s point cut through the cigar smoke.
“Matayo’s got my garage code, my door code, so he’s always at the house,” the Oregon defensive line coach said amongst the postgame locker room at Hard Rock Stadium. It was the way he chose to explain the relationship between himself, his son Teitum and Uiagalelei.
Published Jan. 8, 2026.
Felecia Mulkey was going to make it very, very clear.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’” she said. “It’s simply ‘when.’”
Published Jan. 17, 2026.
Inside ‘Duck Force One,’ the tailgate bus that has carried friends to Oregon games for over a decade
SALEM, Ore. — It’s dark outside, and Cory Dent rolls up the door to his garage and gets out of the rain. This is the back way in, he explains, and you have to walk around the corner to see the bus.
“The bus” is a rebuilt Gillig Phantom model that Dent, who owns an auto repair shop nearby and is a lifetime Oregon fan, dubbed “Duck Force One” when he bought it at auction in 2015. It hit the national spotlight a few weeks ago when a creator met Dent at an Oregon game and posted a video that got more than 300,000 views on Instagram. This room, though, is a world of Dent’s own creation, and the bus is his magnum opus.
Published Nov. 13, 2025.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For a long time on Sept. 27, Beaver Stadium felt so far away from Lucas Oil Stadium.
Oregon could stop the run. Drew Allar hit the impossible throws. It was the Ducks’ freshmen, not the seniors, who were making plays.
But then it started to lean the other way. Penn State toted the rock to overtime. Senior Gary Bryant Jr. caught the touchdown that put Oregon up 30-24. Allar, once again, had to make the play.
And it was third-year athlete, Purdue transfer Dillon Thieneman who was in on first-and-10. In a look that Lanning said Oregon hadn’t shown all game — meant to counter the lateral motion that had gashed the Ducks in the second half — Thieneman rose up and took Allar’s pass in two hands.
“The ball was just right there,” Thieneman said.
Published Sept. 27, 2025.
Blink, and he’s gone. Or maybe you’re the one who’s gone — run over, probably. That’s what happens when you come face-to-face with Oregon’s two youngest running backs.
Published Sept. 25, 2025.
Even from across the room in the south concourse of Autzen Stadium, Matthew Bedford looks big. The two-story ceiling and ten-foot backdrops do little to shrink the frame of the 6’6’’, 315-pound offensive lineman as he climbs up the escalator and through double glass doors. By the time he makes it in front of the microphone, he’s doubled in stature.
“Man, I’m doing great,” he says.
His deep laugh almost matches his size.
Published Aug. 21, 2025.
Matthew Erickson has a routine.
After every race — every workout, too, he takes out one of his notebooks. He still keeps the old ones — the ones he’s had since he started keeping them in seventh grade — in his room. In his current log, he’ll note what shoes he wore, what the weather was like, what he did and how he felt.
“Maybe it sounds a little bit meticulous,” the Oregon senior said.
It’s working.
Published June 13, 2025.
It was quiet, all of a sudden, when they stepped onto the mat. It tends to be when history is being made.
For Angelica Martin and Cassidy Cu, though, it was all about the history they’d already made. They knew these mats like the backs of their hands, and these skills like they knew how to walk. They needed to as they were debuting a skill combination that had never been competed before in the history of acrobatics and tumbling.
No pressure.
Published March 12, 2025.
“No.”
Are you sure you don’t want to keep doing this?
“Probably not.”
That was Jacie Van de Zilver’s answer in 2022 when former Azusa Pacific University acrobatics and tumbling assistant coach Kara Willard asked the then-senior athlete if she’d ever consider coaching the sport. They were on a plane flight back to Southern California from the national championship. She was pretty sure that this sport, however great it was, was over for her.
And that was okay.
Published March 1, 2025.
Thirty-five thousand feet in the air above California, on her way to a recruiting visit for a sport that barely existed, Felecia Mulkey took a napkin from the flight attendant.
She had two problems: The sport which the University of Oregon had hired her to coach didn’t have rules, and she had forgotten her notebook in her checked bag. Carefully, on the wrinkled United Airlines napkin, she sketched out the six-event formula that the collegiate association whose last 12 championships she owns now uses. She relaxed. She could figure out what came next.
Published Feb. 10, 2025.