Waiting for the Fall: A Decade of Dreams, Drama and West Virginia University Football
Mike Casazza is an award-winning reporter and the beat writer for the Charleston Daily Mail and has been covering collegiate athletics since 2002. He’s covered NCAA Tournaments that have ended in the Final Four, Elite Eight and Sweet Sixteen and numerous football bowl games, including three BCS games. He’s broken stories and been around breaking news along the way and has learned more about coaching searches, coaching contracts, litigation and the legal side of sports than he ever predicted. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1980, he graduated from Osbourn High School in Manassas, Va., in 1998 and attended West Virginia University. He was a magna cum laude graduate in 2002, when he was named the Most Outstanding News-Editorial Student and Top Scholar in the Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism. He began his work in a newsroom at the Manassas Journal Messenger in 1996 and moved on to WVU’s Daily Athenaeum in 1998, the Morgantown Dominion Post in 2000 and the Charleston Daily Mail in 2007. He’s won a list of awards from the West Virginia Press Association, including first-place awards for sports news writing in 2009, 2010 and 2011, and was the recipient of an honorable mention honor from the Associated Press Sports Editors for column writing in 2003. He resides in Morgantown, W.Va., with his wife, Erinn, and lives a quick sprint away from Mountaineer Field, in case news ever breaks. Of course, it often breaks when he’s on vacation—or perhaps because he is on vacation.