Daughter Dearest
Parental Boast Alert: In upcoming posts, starting today, I am going to be writing about our three hard-working, good-hearted kids. I will try to rein myself in, but there will be some boasting. If this offends you, please feel free to stop reading. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Seven years ago, just out of the College of William & Mary, Alexandra Coffey took her new history degree to Cooperstown, New York to begin a job at the Baseball Hall of Fame, where she worked under the great Craig Muder in the communications department. Alex, as she likes to be called (I prefer her full name, much to her annoyance), learned a lot about reporting and storytelling under Craig. In her spare time she was the lead singer in a band and found out how to safely navigate the snow-packed roads of the upstate winter. She stayed almost two years and then got hired to join the Seattle Mariners’ PR team. Smart, bilingual and a strong writer, Alex had all the requisite skills to flourish in a baseball media office, except for one problem.
She discovered that she did not like PR. At all. She wanted to find, and tell, fresh stories, not just churn out press releases to make the club look good. My wife and I suggested she be patient and give the new position some time, but nothing changed. Alex wasn’t fulfilled and wanted to do something about it. She started making cold calls. The first was to Jon Wertheim, of Sports Illustrated (and now 60 Minutes), a writer she greatly respected who had started in PR before switching to journalism. Jon graciously took her call and suggested she cast her net beyond traditional print journalism. Next she reached out to Jeff Pearlman, a bestselling author and former SI writer, and James Wagner, then a baseball writer for The New York Times. Both were similarly supportive and urged her to get her work out there however she could.
Alex began writing baseball features on an online platform. One of them was on Angie Mentink, a former college softball star who played for the Colorado Silver Bullets, the all-women’s baseball team coached by Phil Niekro. An editor at The Athletic saw it and was impressed. The Athletic needed a part-time writer to cover the Seattle Storm. Alex knew almost nothing about the WNBA. She studied up fast, then called home.
“I am quitting my job and I’m not asking for your permission,” she said.
Though we had (and have) deep belief in Alex’s ability, my wife and I were stunned and not altogether thrilled. Of course we wanted her to be happy, but the decision seemed hasty. Seattle is an expensive city. How would she be able to make it?
Alex got work as a receptionist at an Aveda hair salon, and as a barista at a coffee place. The Athletic hired her to write two stories a week for $150 apiece. She would regularly go into the salon’s utility closet to do player interviews during her 15-minute breaks. She wrote about coach Dan Hughes’ return from cancer, Jordin Canada’s promise and went to a cooking class with Alysha Clark, Jewell Loyd and Courtney Paris. Soon The Athletic made her a fulltime writer, relocating her to the Bay Area to cover the Oakland A’s. Her work got better and better, even after the pandemic arrived and she had to work remotely. Alex and her beloved cat, Cooper, moved back East and then the Philadelphia Inquirer offered her a position on the Phillies beat. In her first full season, she wrote a piece that was included in The Year’s Best Sportswriting for 2023, a rarefied collection her father never managed to make. Last month she won an AP Sports Editors Top 10 feature for a story on Phillies’ assistant GM Preston Mattingly and his mother, Kim. On her X account - @alexcoffeywrites - Alex refers to herself as a second-generation sportswriter. That is true. It is also true that she is blowing the first generation away
Alex interviewing manager Rob Thomson after the Phillies won the 2022 NL pennant.
I reached out to her Wednesday morning at the Phillies’ spring headquarters in Clearwater, Fla. and asked her to revisit her decision to quit the Mariners’ gig.
“I felt like I was at a stage in my life where I could take that risk,” she said. “Writing for me feels instinctual, natural. I love the process of putting together the pieces of the puzzle to write a story. It sounds corny, but it’s just something that I feel I was meant to do.”
When Alexandra first became a fulltime sportswriter, she didn’t want me to edit, or sometimes even read, her work before it was published. She wanted it to be told in her voice, her style. She wanted it to stand on its own. “I don’t want people to see me as just Wayne Coffey’s daughter,” she said. She need not worry. Because very soon –maybe already – I will be primarily known for being Alex Coffey’s father.