Ethan Bauer(right) with ESPN’s Israel Gutierrez, a fellow UF and Miami Herald alum, on the set of “Dan LeBatard is Highly Questionable” at ESPN’s South Beach studio on the last day of Ethan’s internship.

INTERNSHIP CHECK IN: Ethan Bauer, Miami Herald

We check in with journalism major Ethan Bauer who interned with the Miami Herald this summer. Ethan has taken full advantage of this opportunity and has turned the internship into another opportunity for the fall.

My first day at the Miami Herald was spent doing nearly nothing at all. I showed up at Marlins Park at 2:30 in the afternoon and went into the locker room, watched the7 p.m. game and chatted with the Herald’s Marlins beat writer. But I didn’t write anything.

Ethan Bauer (left) with fellow UF students/alums Patrick Pinak (interning with the MLB.com as a Marlins reporter), Ian Cohen (sports intern with the Sun Sentinel) and Grace King (reporter for WUFT) covering the All-Star Futures Game. We also covered the home run derby and All-Star Game together.

The next day, however, I was back at Marlins Park completely on my own, and that’s pretty much how things stayed from then on. During my 10 weeks at the Herald, I was “thrown into the deep end,” as my boss liked to say, from beginning to end. During that time, I covered everything from the All-Star Game to a hotdog eating contest to Edinson Volquez’s no-hitter (Fun fact: I was told that made me the third-ever Miami Herald reporter to cover a Marlins no-hitter).

Ian, Patrick and Ethan in the media room at the Futures Game.

But while those events and many others were all memorable, the most fulfilling part of the internship were the enterprise pieces the Herald let me write. I remember on my first day there, my boss told me I’d never be able to write anything over 70 inches (about 2,100 words). By the end, I’d written one 85-inch piece on the declining health and questionable futures of middle-aged former Dolphins players and a 93-inch piece that reviewed the significance, permanence and inescapability that still surrounds Jose Fernandez’s death ahead of the All-Star Game.

This is a screenshot of the Miami Herald’s Snapchat story very early in Ethan’s internship. It was taken at the All-Broward breakfast, which celebrates the best high school athletes in Broward County and from which he wrote this story: http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/high-school/article152635139.html

Both those pieces came to be thanks to my incredible colleagues at the paper. Folks like Dolphins reporter Adam Beasley, who shared some of his Dolphins contacts with me to help resurrect the Dolphins story when I was struggling. Or staff writer Linda Robertson, who went line-by line over that story to trim it from 2,800 to 2,100 words and taught me about concision and detail along the way. Or tourism reporter Chabeli Hererra, who translated my interview with Jose Fernandez’s mother, Maritza, from Spanish to English. (Interesting anecdote: I landed that interview with Maritza by leaving a note — written in both English and Spanish — and a couple of clips to establish credibility in her mailbox because all I had was her address. Later in the day after I left the note, her lawyer called to say that he’d let me speak with her because of the “foresight” of leaving the note. That made the Miami Herald one of two publications in the world that spoke with Maritza ahead of the All-Star Game, with the other being ESPN’s Pedro Gomez for E:60.) Or sports editor Jorge Rojas, who stayed at the Herald with me until past 10 p.m. on a Friday night where he had to drive to Naples to finish the Jose story.

It’s because of them and many, many others that interning at the Herald was such a fun, rewarding experience — one that made the editors trust me enough to let me cover Gators as the paper’s UF beat writer this upcoming season.