My first time -- like everyone else’s I assume -- was really awkward. She was much older than me, and I was as nervous as I’d ever been in my life. What made it even more interesting was the fact that her husband introduced us.
   
Intrigued?
   
I was finishing up the first true journalism class I had taken at Ohio State. The quarter was winding down, and our final assignment was to interview someone and write a feature about them. Sounded easy enough to me; I love to talk to people -- at least I thought I did.
   
That fateful assignment was the first step towards the realization of two important details about myself. For one, I wasn’t as good at listening as I had once thought. It turned out that for a long time other people talking was just the time off between the important things I had to say. The second was that, for a guy who doesn’t get nervous, I sure did sweat a lot in pressure situations.
   
My goal was to interview Ellen Tressel, the wife of OSU head coach Jim Tressel, and ask her what it was like as the wife of a guy who is in charge of arguably one of the best college football programs in the country. In high school, I had dated a girl whose dad was a coach and her mom always said that coach’s wives had the harder job. Well, I was going to find out.

The assignment started as a simple email to Coach Tressel. I was sure that he had someone to check his email, and that if said person did not return the correspondence within the week, I would begin looking for another approach.     

Not two hours later, there was a message in my inbox from the man himself. It read something like, “Hey Jim I think that’s a great idea, Ellen is a great interview. I’ll forward your request to her.”

It was signed, “Go Bucks, JT.”