For as long as she could remember, Asia Jupiter wanted to play basketball for a living.
Sadly, those hopes were extinguished when the then Hahnville Tigers basketball player injured her knee during her junior season. Jupiter tore her ACL, and though she worked to return for her senior year, she knew she wasn’t the same.
The good news? This story appears primed for a happy ending. Jupiter had a “Plan B” — seemingly a great one.
Jupiter was recently recognized by the St. Charles Parish School Board for finishing in the top 1 percent of student sportswriters in the nation and awarded an excellent rating in this year’s Journalism Education Association’s National Write-Off Competition. That competition was held in Los Angeles at the National Scholastic Press Association Conference and saw Jupiter matched against 70 of the top student writers in the country. The writers held a “press conference” with a vegan bicyclist and then had an hour to write their story.
Her expectations were initially low.
“I felt it was good, but I wasn’t sure it would be good enough,” Jupiter said. “At first, I was debating if I’d even go to the awards ceremony, because I didn’t think I’d win. Seeing all of the other writers there in the same room was a bit intimidating.”
But eventually, after some prompting from her mother, Ginger — “She forced me to go. She wouldn’t have it another way,” Jupiter recalled — she indeed went to the ceremony. She was glad she did.
“It seemed like they called 1,000 names before they got to my category,” she said. “Then they called my name and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I actually did it!’ It was really exciting. I felt I was representing my school, my parish and my state … we were the only school from Louisiana there. My teacher (Elbert DuPont) was really excited, too.”
She said judges told her that her story, titled, “Taking cycling back one vegan at a time,” caught their eye because it was “different.”
“They said I had a great lead, good quotes and that I used facts instead of opinions,” Jupiter said.
Seeking to set herself apart has been key to her early success.
“I try to focus on not just what’s happening in the game,” she said. “I try to address more about the impact someone off the field, with their teammates, or really anything people would find interesting (about the subject) that they wouldn’t likely know already.”
Officially leaving her hopes for a basketball career behind was difficult for her. The injury was initially devastating for Jupiter.
“I cried about it, many times honestly,” Jupiter said. “It was something I’d worked on forever. I had and still have such a love for it.”
But sports journalism was a natural shift for Jupiter after her injury. She is a lifelong sports fanatic and her school writing assignments already tracked toward athletics when she could choose her topic. An 8th grade assignment where she detailed her belief that LeBron James had surpassed Kobe Bryant in the realm of all-time great NBA stars hooked her for good.
She now attends Southeastern Louisiana University as a freshman where she majors in communications. She also has received the opportunity to work as an intern for Louisiana Football Magazine.
Jupiter loves to write, but she also has aspirations to work as a sportscaster. Ultimately, she hopes to reach ESPN.
If she gets there, she says it will be because of her natural enthusiasm for what she does.
“My love for it, I guess, is what drives me,” she said. “If you find something you love to do, it really becomes easy. The excitement I get from doing this makes it not even feel like work.”
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