Some people wonder why L.A. Dickerson drives from the Detroit area to East Lansing every day. She says it’s just like coming home.
“This is my J-School, this is where I graduated from,” said Dickerson, who currently teaches advanced sports reporting classes, among other subjects. “There is just nothing better than being able to help a student.”
Dickerson worked for years as a staff writer at the Detroit Free Press, first covering sports and eventually moving to police reporting, before joining the faculty at MSU in 1996. One thing she said she consistently noticed during her time as a reporter was the staggeringly low number of women involved in sports reporting. This led her to join the Association for Women in Sports Media, a group she has been involved with on and off throughout the years.
Last year, after noticing an increasing amount of students looking to find careers in sports, Dickerson came up with the idea to start a student chapter of the Association for Women in Sports Media at MSU.
“Whenever I have young women in my classes I always try to get them to be members,” she said. “I thought I had the wonderful idea to start a student chapter.”
Dickerson said she had hoped the MSU student chapter would be the first in the nation, but she found out Oklahoma State University already had that distinction.
“(OSU) was really nice in sharing their bylaws and how they set-up their chapter,” she said.
She hopes the organization can help women network and get the careers in sports they are looking for.
Dickerson said she is more than happy to use the connections she has from working in sports to help students get the jobs they want. It also doesn’t hurt that her husband is Dan Dickerson, who, along with former Detroit Tiger great Jim Price, is the radio voice of Tigers.
She said having a husband in such an important position who is willing to talk to her students provides a great learning opportunity.
“He brings in all his various materials and just shows them how he does his job,” she said. “It’s a really nice perk for our students and it’s really fun for me because he’s just a great guy and I love having him around our kids.”