Getting to know Pounding the Rock’s writers: Casey Coggins
What a long strange trip it’s been to wind up a writer.
Welcome to “Getting to know Pounding the Rock’s writers”! During the All-Star break, we thought it we be fun to get to know a little bit more about our writers here at PtR.
A bit about myself
In my family tree, creativity just seems to find you. We have painters, book and interior designers, musicians, photographers, and, of course, writers. Growing up, my least favorite class was always English. I couldn’t bring myself to read the books assigned, but I was creative enough to figure out ways to complete assignments well enough to get decent grades. I went to magnet schools for middle and high school that were focused on computer programming, engineering, rocketry, and other STEM-type subjects, and ended up doing my freshman year at Baylor University as a mechanical engineering major.
But like I said, creativity found me. It came as a Christmas present from my older brother, Cody, who had bought me the recently released Bill Simmons book, The Book of Basketball. I read it cover to cover, the first book I had done that with since my fourth-grade teacher did a read-along to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 10 years earlier. It opened my eyes to the reality that professional writing could be more conversational and more fun. I changed majors the next semester, ended up with a communications degree from Arizona State (shoutout to Starbucks for full tuition reimbursement to their online program), and found myself writing professionally for a living as a social media manager.
How I became a Spurs fan
Like many born and raised in San Antonio, becoming a San Antonio Spurs fan was basically determined long before I took my first breath on Earth. Both of my parents moved to town when they were young because both of my granddads ended up being stationed here, and they’ve been here ever since. In fact, they both ended up in the same neck of the woods, graduating from Roosevelt High School a few years apart (same school my siblings and I would graduate from decades later). I’ve never actually had the conversation about what they did with my older brother and I that made us such big basketball fans, but I imagine the picture above plays some part of it.
How I ended up at Pounding the Rock
This all comes down to a tweet coming across my timeline and me being confident enough to respond to it. 200 years ago, all the way back in 2020, the NBA season didn’t start until late December. To gear up for that year, Pounding the Rock was looking for some people to help with live tweeting games and promote the articles we all know and love. I had a year and a half of social media management and figured, “I’d probably be a decent fit,” so I left a reply. Less than four hours later, I received a DM asking for some information about myself and ended up being brought on. As I wrote in my reply to the aforementioned tweet, it’s an honor getting to be a part of this wonderful community of writers and Spurs fans.
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