by PETER DORFMAN
During the 19 years that The Herald-Times reporter Jeremy Price has covered Bloomington sports, he’s chronicled the ups and downs of high school and college athletics and seen his share of upheavals at the paper—changes in staff, ownership, and the profession of journalism. “I’ve seen the changes of just about everything by now,” he says.
Price, 46, grew up in High Point, North Carolina, and studied journalism at Asbury College near Lexington, Kentucky. He joined The Herald-Times in May 2000, originally as a paginator—a junior editor. “We would pull in wire service content, write headlines, put in pictures, and proof the pages,” he recalls. “I was on the desk that Sunday night in the fall of 2000 when [Indiana University men’s basketball coach] Bobby Knight got fired. Usually Sunday nights were quiet, but that night was anything but.”
Price got his first writing break about a year later. “We needed help with high school soccer sectionals,” Price says. “I’d coached high school soccer for a couple of years, so I volunteered.”
Gradually, he branched out, contributing to special tabloid sections on IU basketball. In 2008, he began writing full time, with a focus on IU soccer, high school girls’ basketball, and, eventually, IU women’s basketball.
In 2012, he got his shot at a column providing original perspectives. Price now writes columns on IU football and men’s basketball, while continuing to report on IU and high school sports.
When sports shut down in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff treaded water. Price wrote about IU’s new athletic director, about social unrest, and even about online virtual sports. “We had to be inventive,” he says. “We had pressure to stay relevant.”
During the summer, the staff was furloughed one week per month for three months. “We caught up on the back stories, how people were dealing with canceled seasons,” Price says. “We did stories on all the seniors, to give them some of the spotlight they weren’t going to get on the field or the court.”
Price lives in Bloomington with his wife and daughter, a sophomore—and softball player—at Bloomington High School South.
He credits local high school coaches and athletic directors as unsung heroes for improvising ways to salvage the sports experience during the pandemic. “They deserve a lot of credit for figuring out how it could work.”
