Janie McCauley walks with Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry. (Courtesy of Janie McCauley)
Janie McCauley has covered some of the greatest athletes of all time during her three decades covering sports: Seattle Mariners great Ichiro Suzuki, Golden State Warriors icon Stephen Curry and even Michael Jordan.
The Washington State University graduate and former Spokesman-Review reporter said she enjoys those stories and is grateful to cover games for a living. She’s also learned to combine good journalism with humanizing and helping people, something she may not have been equipped for early on in her career.
“The stories beyond the game are what drive me,” she said. “I’m still motivated to find them, and when that stops, when I’m no longer motivated to find them, then maybe I should do something different.”
McCauley, an Associated Press sportswriter based in San Francisco, has been assigned to cover six Olympics and three Super Bowls, including Super Bowl 60 on Sunday when the Seattle Seahawks play the New England Patriots in Santa Clara.
“My dad would be thrilled that I’m covering the Seahawks in the Super Bowl,” said McCauley, who lost her father to cancer 13 years ago.
She wore his U.S. Army identification tags around her neck Thursday at the Moscone Center, where media covering the Super Bowl are stationed, in downtown San Francisco.
Growing up in Leavenworth, Washington, McCauley is also excited to see Seattle play.
“If they win, do I plan to get confetti off the field for my nieces and nephews and whoever back in Washington wants it? Yeah, I’ll go down there and I’ll take a bag and I’ll get as much confetti off the field and send it,” she said.
McCauley, 50, has spent half her life as an AP reporter, including 2000 to 2002 in Seattle and then the past 24 years in the Bay Area.
McCauley grew up a Seattle Supersonics fan. For her 16th birthday, she even saw Jordan’s Chicago Bulls play the Sonics in a preseason game at the Kingdome. She still has that ticket stub.
“We’d go once a year to a Sonic game, and that was a highlight of my year,” she said.
She said she’s now old enough that she cheered for Sonics great Gary Payton, covered him when she worked as an AP reporter in Seattle and now covers Payton’s son, Gary Payton II, who plays for the Warriors, one of her primary beats as a reporter.
She still sees the elder Payton from time to time because he coaches the men’s basketball program at College of Alameda, not far from McCauley’s home.
She said the Sonics and Cascade High School (Leavenworth) girls basketball helped influenced her sportswriting career. She wrote letters to the girls players as a sixth-grader and got to visit them in the locker room in the state playoffs.
McCauley said she didn’t know her sports career path would be journalism until her junior year of high school when she started working at the Leavenworth Echo, a weekly newspaper.
An editor at that paper at the time said she should go to Washington State University if she was serious about a media career. She couldn’t join the student newspaper as a freshman at Western Washington University, so she moved to Pullman, which was a “good decision,” she said.
McCauley’s X account, formerly Twitter, says “#MurrowCollege proud” referring to WSU’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication. She returned to WSU a couple years ago when the college honored her in its “Hall of Achievement.”
She interned or worked at various Northwest newspapers during college, like the Oregonian, Wenatchee World, Moscow-Pullman Daily News, Lewiston Tribune and Idaho Statesman. She said her goal at that time was to write for Sports Illustrated.
“I do feel like I could go on an airplane and find a story with almost everybody on the airplane,” she said. “I mean, and then sitting down to write it is the hard part. But, I did love it. I loved the idea of going to games and watching sports for a living and getting to tell stories about people’s triumphs and challenges, and maybe, once in a great while, inspire somebody by something I write about someone.”
She graduated from WSU in 1998 and joined The Spokesman-Review, where she covered prep sports and the Spokane Indians.
“I really learned how to search for good stories on the prep beat that could be impactful,” McCauley said.
She said she still oddly has dreams in her sleep once or twice a year that she’s back at The Spokesman-Review with her colleagues.
“It was such a good training ground for me to try things and make mistakes, but also have this supportive crew (of reporters and editors).”
She left for the AP Seattle bureau in 2000 covering news and sports. Then, Ichiro showed up in 2001 when the Mariners won a record-tying 116 games and Ichiro took home American League Rookie of the Year and MVP honors.
“There were a handful of other Japanese players, but he was sort of the trailblazer,” McCauley said.
She said she and Ichiro got along from the start.
“We couldn’t write enough about him,” McCauley said.
She arrived at the San Francisco AP bureau in 2002, right before the San Francisco Giants made the World Series and the then-Oakland Raiders made the Super Bowl.
“My timing’s been really fortunate,” McCauley said. “You know, I’ve had good timing, and I’ve made the most of it, I think.”
She’s an AP national baseball writer, including coverage of the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, and reports on the NBA’s Warriors, as well as college basketball and baseball.
She extensively covered the Warriors basketball dynasty in the 2010s, including players Curry and Kevin Durant. She said watching Curry has been “a true joy,” and he’s someone she’s developed a great relationship with.
“Until Stephen Curry’s gone, I’m gonna focus on the Warriors,” she said.
Some of her stories she’s most fond of had little to do with the game, but human rights and human interest. Some of her proudest stories have centered on California’s men’s prison population.
In December, she wrote about California State Prison Solano’s program where inmates, many of whom will never leave prison, find a new sense of purpose by cooking meals for their fellow inmates, guards and guests for little pay.
Six months before that story, she penned an article about another Solano prison program where youth coaches from the Warriors Basketball Academy teach inmates coaching skills, again, giving them a sense of self-worth and encouraging them to be positive influences for other inmates.
In 2022, McCauley, a former collegiate tennis player, wrote about playing with and against inmates at San Quentin State Prison, a program that allows visitors to play the sport with the men. She took 25 years off from playing the game, but has picked it back up and is playing competitively again.
She said she has since started a tennis program at Solano and has made friends with inmates.
She said the experience has been “rewarding” and “life-changing.”
“Suddenly, journalism has become also a pathway for me to help people, and it’s been nice,” McCauley said.
She said she’s always trying to find a story that would appeal to a reader who is not a sports fan.
“That’s still something I strive for,” she said.
McCauley said she’s thankful her career has allowed her to travel the country and globe.
“I count my blessings every day that I get to do this as a job and see the world doing it,” she said.