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Meanwhile, MacMullan had become frustrated by the lack of coverage given to girls' sports in the local newspaper. She complained to her father, who urged her to call up the paper. The sports editor tossed her a challenge: "Why don't you write something and I'll put it in the paper?"

FAMILY TIME: Jackie MacMullan '82 and her daughter, Alyson.

"I'm a kid," protested the 15-year-old. But before she knew it, the kid had her own column. Her subject: girls who were exceptional athletes.

By the time she got to UNH, MacMullan knew she wanted to be a sportswriter, and the late Don Murray '48, director of the journalism program, encouraged her. Twice he urged her to take one of her stories over to the editors of the New Hampshire, UNH's student newspaper. She recalls being too scared to take his advice. Finally, he said, "Look, either you want to do this or you don't."

Journalism professor Andrew Merton '67 played a different role in MacMullan's development as a budding journalist. "What have I learned from this?" he would ask, waving her homework assignment in the air. "Nothing! Teach me something I don't already know." At the end of the semester, she wrote a story about Mary Brady Legere '82, now a lieutenant colonel in the Army, showing how the 19-year-old ROTC student overcame her terror of jumping out of an airplane. MacMullan had at last succeeded in teaching Merton something he didn't already know.

At UNH, MacMullan also played basketball, walking onto the varsity team as a freshman. She led the squad in scoring her sophomore season and as a senior became a co-captain. She excelled, she believes, not because she had exceptional ability, but because she had a willingness to work hard. She applied the same work ethic to preparing for her career, completing not one but two newspaper internships--at the Gloucester (Mass.) Daily Times and the Boston Globe. The Globe hired her as a sportswriter in 1983.

From the beginning, her experience as an athlete helped MacMullan understand the players, and the extra stamina came in handy for dashing from press box to locker room. Once she got there, however, she was hardly made to feel welcome. In the early years of her career, she was bounced from a locker room by UMass security guards and told "You don't belong in there," by Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach. She narrowly avoided injury when Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants threw a hair dryer at her. "In the beginning, probably 90 percent of the time I was the only woman in there," she says. "It was a huge issue--one that made you wonder whether you wanted to do the job or not."

From left: Terry Francona, Red Sox Manager; the Red Sox's Daisuke Matsuzaka; pitcher Curt Schilling and a canine friend.

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