Safer Sidelines with Stephanie Kuzydym

Our guest, Stephanie Kuzydym is a a DuPont and Emmy award winning journalist, who is the sports enterprise reporter in Louisville, KY at the Louisville Courier Journal, which is part of the USA TODAY Network. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University . She started her journalism career in the sports departments of newspapers in Oklahoma, Ohio and Texas before flipping over to the broadcast side where she learned investigative and accountability reporting.  In the world of sports medicine, she reported a seven-month investigation into sudden death in youth sports called Safer Sidelines. She was recently awarded the National Athletic Trainers Association’s President’s Service Award, the Secondary Schools Athletic Trainers’ Committee advocate award and the Korey Stringer Institute’s Life Saving Education Award. She is always down for a road trip if it includes a stop at Buc-ees.  Lately she’s been asking some difficult but insightful questions into a real issue on our school sports sidelines.

 In April, her multi-part series, “Safer Sidelines” uncovered the many ways high schools, athletic associations and lawmakers have failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario  sudden death in sports.

Prior to Louisville, Kuzydym worked in Cincinnati as a TV producer of the special projects and investigative unit for WKRC-TV, Local 12. Alongside unit photographer Eric Gerhardt, Kuzydym produced two special projects: Athletes AT Risk, which looked at the health and safety of high school athletes and the healthcare missing from sidelines, and Childhood Poverty: Cincinnati’s Crisis, which uncovered why Cincinnati has the fourth-highest childhood poverty rate.

She previously worked as a producer on a five-person investigative and special projects unit for KHOU-TV in Houston, where she was responsible for generating new story ideas, planning and conducting interviews, obtaining and organizing data and filing more than 800 open records requests to school districts, police departments and other governmental entities. Her work focused on taking deep dives into police body cameras, teenage anxiety, sex trafficking and high school athletics departments, in Houston and nationally. Her team’s work earned them a DuPont, a Gracie and a Lone Star EMMY. 

In Cleveland, her reporting into concussions turned into a multi-part project, “Mind Over Matter,” which was awarded a Headliner Award.

JSMP website: www.jaxsmp.com

FASMED website http://fasmed.fadss.org/

Guest biography & contact information

Stephanie Kuzydym email: [email protected]

Twitter @stephkuzy

Deadly Games Database: https://data.courier-journal.com/deadly-games-sudden-death-in-athletes/