Nick Kelly, formerly of The Tuscaloosa News and now with AL.com, is the fifth recipient of the Edward Aschoff Rising Star Award, which is named after the beloved ESPN college football reporter who died on Christmas Eve in 2019 on his 34th birthday from previously undetected Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma in his lungs.
The award is presented each year by the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) to one promising journalist no older than 34 who has not only the talent and work ethic it takes to succeed in the business, but also the passion to make it better.
“I hope I can carry on his legacy of really making an impact on people and the way he did his job,” Kelly said. “I really do hope I can continue to do that. It is such an honor to get an award with his name on it.”
Kelly, 26, graduated from the University of Missouri in 2020. He was recognized for his outstanding work on the Alabama football beat and coverage in the aftermath of Nick Saban’s retirement. Kelly accepted a writing position with AL.com ahead of the 2024 football season.
Wilson Alexander of The Advocate was the fourth winner of the award in 2023. Other past winners include former Sports Illustrated reporter and current CBS Sports reporter Richard Johnson (2022), The Athletic’s Grace Raynor (2021) and The Athletic’s David Ubben (2020).
Kelly joined The Tuscaloosa News in 2021. He worked as an intern with Boston Globe Media and worked for the Columbia Missourian and Minneapolis Star-Tribune before taking on the Alabama beat.
“When I joined The Tuscaloosa News in 2021, you knew with Nick Saban’s retirement, there was a decent chance I would be covering it,” Kelly said. “I think you were always mentally prepared for it. It was surreal when it happened, but at the same time I was prepared for the plan of action.”
Kelly credits Tommy Deas, his editor at the Tuscaloosa News, for helping put that plan into action when news broke of Saban’s retirement on Jan. 10.
Kelly was able to use his relationship with Saban’s children — Nicholas and Kristen — to produce a profile of life after retirement for the entire family. Kelly said the key to producing content that stood out in that month was asking the right internal questions.
“How can we use the relationships I’ve built in my time here to tell different aspects of the story?” Kelly said. “Everyone was talking about it. Everyone wanted to know about it. No detail was too small, so it was a matter of, ‘How can we cultivate those details?'”
Kelly said he took two lessons from the late Cecil Hurt, the longtime columnist at The Tuscaloosa News who died in 2021, to stay grounded on the Alabama beat. Kelly said Hurt was genuine at all times but also worked the beat with the tongue-in-cheek mantra of “everyone else knows more than you do.”
“The humility of ‘people know more than you do’ is such a mindset I try to keep when I go about my work,” he said.
Kelly said he also has an appreciation for Aschoff, whose legacy endures with the Rising Star Award.
“I’m well aware of his legacy and seeing what people have said about him,” Kelly said. “Finding out I’m winning an award named for him is really, really cool because I know what he accomplished in a short time.”
Aschoff, a 2008 graduate of the University of Florida, was a talented storyteller, whether he was on camera or crafting a written piece. And even as his career at ESPN blossomed into more of a national television role when he moved to Los Angeles in 2017, he still guided and befriended younger journalists along the way.