in the field: shireen ahmed of cbc sports
in the field: shireen ahmed of cbc sports
"People see the success but they don't see the rejections and the other jobs you pick up in the meantime and the places you have to write just to pay the bills."
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I’m so excited to bring you the second installment of “In the Field,” the series where I talk to cool people doing important work in the world of sports journalism.
Shireen Ahmed and I have known each other in the online world of “non-men in sports writing” for the better part of a decade now. Like me, Shireen started as a freelancer, elbowing her way into paid bylines at bigger and bigger publications before landing a full-time newsroom job as a Senior Contributor at CBC Sports. I have been so impressed with the way Shireen has done what so many freelancers struggle to do—leverage a freelance career into a job in a newsroom—while never losing her voice or integrity.
I asked Shireen how she would describe her work for people who were unfamiliar with it and she said she was “a professional disruptor and a multi-platform journalist.” She also teaches sports journalism and sports media at Toronto Metropolian University.
Shireen is one of the few Muslim women working in sports media—particularly in Canada—and her work as a columnist always comes from place of centering marginalized voices. In just the past few months, Shireen has broken the news about the WNBA coming to Toronto, received the The 2024 North American Society for Sport History Award for Sport History and Social Justice, and become the first hijab-wearing woman on an official Olympic broadcast in Canada.
Shireen is continuing to broadcast the Paralympic Games for CBC, as well.
“People think [this kind of success] happens overnight,” Shireen told me. “People don't see the rejections and the other jobs you pick up in the meantime and the places you have to write just to pay the bills. They see the success but they don't see what happens behind the scenes. And it was a very unorthodox path that I had.”
Below, Shireen and I talk about that unorthodox path, the importance of having an editor who will go to bat for you, getting her first scoop, and why more journalists should befriend academics.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can follow Shireen at @_shireenahmed_ on X and @footybedsheets on Instagram.
Out of Your League: You often say that your path to being a sports journalist was “unorthodox.” Can you share a little bit about your career trajectory?
Shireen Ahmed: I had been an independent contributor for my entire career, and that is mostly due to the fact that Canadian sports media is 95% white, able-bodied, cishet men. I really don't reflect the industry that I work in—or rather, my industry doesn't reflect the greater community. I couldn't get a byline. I couldn't get anybody to publish me. So my career came up through a Tumblr blog and I was too stubborn to let people take my work for free. I was like, I'm going to self publish. Even if that meant Tumblr.
Then I started creating content and writing for different places, like the blog Muslim Women in Sports Network, and really sharpened my teeth on writing original copy and stories. I did some work for [other blogs that focused on the Muslim community] but I wrote, probably most foremost, for a feminist Muslim blog called Muslim Media Watch. Now I take issue with the word ‘feminist’ for so many reasons, but at the time—and we're talking like 14 years ago—it's really where I started to examine media depictions. So as I came up through sports journalism, adjacent to that was keeping an eye and observing the way that Muslims were depicted in media, and through a sports lens I applied layers of intersectionality, because my critique and analysis has always been that.
I really I got my first byline break with a co-authored piece with Dave Zirin in The Nation, and then I got my first solo piece because I harassed the people at VICE to let me write about the hijab ban in 2016. Huffington Post picked up a couple of my blog pieces and I guess you could say I got bylines from that. But I had already written them, and they didn't pay me. So I did a lot of free work— far too much free work.
There's a lot of gatekeeping in this industry, and so I did most of my work in the UK around football—soccer in the United States. When we started [the feminist sports podcast] Burn It All Down in 2017, that changed a lot of things. Again with unpaid labor, but you start getting connections and you start writing. And then people start asking you to write more, as opposed to me constantly pitching and get rejected.
OOYL: Oh god, the rejections. I will say that I have always loved freelancing and have very thick skin around rejections but the freelance market is so bleak right now. I’m glad you have a newsroom job and don’t have to try to wade through it.
SA: When somebody asked me in 2015 what I did, I said, ‘I write pitches and get rejected for a living.’ It's really interesting because I keep receipts for everything—and when I say that, I just mean I search my Google Inbox.
I had pitched stories where eight, nine years later, people are coming back to me asking me. It's funny, the people that care about this now, because I literally have receipts and emails of people rejecting me constantly in the New York Times. [The editor] wrote back because I said, ‘I have emails of me insisting this is going to matter.’ And people will be like, ‘No, it's not something we're interested in or we're looking at,’ because Muslim women or hijab issues don't matter [to mainstream media gatekeepers]. But as soon as they start making wider headlines, people are coming to me and I'm like, ‘Yeah, I pitched this to you five years ago, and you thought it was worth nothing. So let's have a conversation about why that's changed.’ And people freak out.
Ten years ago, I couldn't get anybody to let me write a piece on the hijab ban and it’s become an international campaign now. Human Rights First, Amnesty International, Athlete Ally, are all on a campaign to bring attention to the hijab ban in France. Breanna Stewart signed it. Becky Hammon signed it. Natasha Cloud signed it. Layshia Clarendon signs everything important, they signed it.
I think back to 2016, and me emailing Tomas Rios at VICE, who's no longer there because they shut their sports vertical down. I pitched and pitched and pitched, and would never get a reply. So I changed my subject line. I put “NAKED VAMPIRE BASKETBALL AT MIDNIGHT.”
And that's when he read my email. And then he's like, ‘Okay, you got me. I'll give you a hundred bucks. Write this piece.’
That's how I got my first paid solo byline, Frankie.
OOYL: OK that’s incredible. My first mainstream sports byline was also at VICE Sports. David Roth, who is now at Defector, took a chance on me and assigned me my first real sports piece.
SA: This was the time when Twitter was really helpful. Once upon a time Twitter was this magical place that people could connect, despite there being systems of oppression. Now Twitter is on life support, and it saddens me so deeply because it used to be a wonderful place to connect with colleagues and make networks.
I had been doing work and then in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, I got a call from TSN, which is one of the biggest sports networks in Canada. They wanted me to write for them because, literally, their staff was completely white and they had no tools or language or analysis to deal with anything race related. I wrote for them for about a year-and-a-half.
And then I got a call from CBC Sports and they wanted to have a chat, and it was the best decision I ever made. I'm really lucky. I really like where I work, I get to write what I want for the most part, and as long as it's timely and related to happenings in the world.
OOYL: Speaking of your work at CBC Sports, you recently broke the news that Toronto was getting a WNBA team. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like? It’s so different from the commentary and analysis that you are known for!
SA: I had gotten a tip back in March that sports mogul Larry Tanenbaum was pursuing a Toronto WNBA team. So I dug around and ended up being the first to report that. Fast forward to May, and my editor’s like, ‘You need to follow up.’ I scaffolded it off what I knew before. It's a lot of cold calling and asking people and getting ignored, and no one replying to my emails. It was rough. It's humbling to be told no. I'm not very good at chasing people, it's not what I do. I hate it.
But I wrote my copy at midnight and then my editor read through it and tweaked it. And then we had a meeting with the network because they were like, ‘This is going to be the biggest story in Canada.’ I really didn't think, Frankie, that it would be as big as it was. I'm not being naive here, but someone said, ‘It's the biggest story since Kawhi Leonard was traded.’
We had a network meeting and everybody wanted a piece of it. And they're like, ‘Okay, Shireen, you can't do ten back-to-back interviews.’ We figured out a plan a programming plan, we had all that worked out, but they wanted to hold the story for a day.
I went home and tried to go to sleep, and woke up every 15 minutes because the story was gonna drop at 4 am. I kept thinking all day, ‘We're gonna get scooped.’ I kept looking at my phone. I kept looking at my phone going ‘we're gonna get scooped. We're gonna get scooped.’
We didn't get scooped. And at 4 am the story dropped.
It went nuts. And my phone was blowing up. I did media all day and was on absolute adrenaline. It was an incredible day. People were calling me with tears of joy. I don't get to do things like that. This was once-in-a-career opportunity for me to break a story. In this industry, the same insiders have all the same scoops. I'm not an insider. And this was like old school journalism, which was so fun.
I had to text my parents and say, ‘I'm gonna be on the news,’ and my mother had fallen asleep by the time I told my dad at 11. She goes to sleep fairly early, and her alarm is CBC News. She woke up to my voice on the World Report at 6:45 am, my first interview of the day.
One of the most heartening things for me, personally, was to have so many young racialized women say, ‘We're really glad it was you.’ CBC Sports, we're not an investigative unit. People don't think of us first for sports coverage. We're rights holders for the Olympics but it's usually TSN and Sportsnet [breaking sports news], and the fact that they were all scooped was kind of cool. My bosses were definitely happy.
OOYL: You have talked about your colleagues and editors a lot, and I think this is really important. I ran my first interview for this series with Marisa Ingemi who's at the San Francisco Chronicle, and her role was created for her by an editor who then continues to fight for her. You're also talking about having somebody in your corner. Can you talk about the difference it makes, having an editor who will go to bat for you when doing this kind of “controversial” work?
SA: I docked my ship after like 14 years at CBC Sports, and had been working freelance, and the relationship between an editor and a writer is really important. When I started naively so many years ago, I didn't realize how important that was. That [early freelance editorial] relationship, I would just submit something. Somebody I knew or didn't know would go through the Google Docs and say ‘this change, that change.’
But [my editor Pat and I] have editorial meetings weekly, and then on top of that, as need be. The relationship has blossomed because I really, really respect him and his work. I know what his career has been and he's a force, but he's also someone with so much integrity. If you don't have an editor backing you up, you can be left alone out there floating.
I'm on a full-time contract with the CBC. I'm considered part of that family and treated that way, and that is not a privilege I've had before this job. I've been there two-and-a-half years, and it has been so nice to have that. Also, having a really good editor sharpens you as a writer and as a creative generally.
But also having people around you that are so supportive helps too. My colleagues were so, so proud. I had people come up to my desk and be like, ‘This made us feel so good. People are texting us, saying we're so proud of CBC Sports,’ because we're the little guy on the scene.
This kind of work doesn't happen in a silo. It happens with a lot of people.
OOYL: What is something that you think helps set you apart from other people in this field?
SA: Making friends with academics has emboldened and enriched my work. That's why Burn It All Down was so pivotal for me, because I was working every day with academics and they're the basis for so much of what I do.
What I've learned is immeasurable and when I teach, I tell my students to make friends with sports sociologists and sports historians immediately. I'm trying to get them to tap into the experts. I've been really lucky and very humbled to have been in places where I don't know anything and have to keep learning, from other colleagues, as well. I've learned a lot about gender expansiveness from you and Katie Barnes. You have to keep learning and that's one of the things that I think has helped me.
You can follow Shireen at @_shireenahmed_ on X and @footybedsheets on Instagram.