I have tried to balance my website with insights from talented writers young and old, though, for obvious reasons, the advice I share with visitors to the website tends to come mostly from men and women who have spent decades in the journalism trenches.

For experience brings wisdom, and wisdom is what I hope people visit the site to get – not necessarily from me, but from educators, from award-winning writers and from smart editors. All have shared advice that should guide an aspiring sportswriter or an up-and-coming sportswriter – hell, even an old pro at the craft  — to producing sports stories that are more entertaining.

In this hi-tech world of 4G iPhones and iPads, of cars that park themselves and of 3D TV, who has time to be bored?

So sportswriters find themselves with a challenge: How to write well and stay within the journalistic structure? This isn’t fiction we’re talking about; it’s hard, fact-driven information, stories that often touch people’s emotions or that can make people think.

That all sounds hard, right? It is, too. Producing those kinds of sports stories takes confidence and a thorough grounding in grammar, in usage and in journalism principles. It’s a challenge for a sportswriter to take a mountain of facts, hours of direct quotes and a spiral notebook packed with descriptions and then turn them into a masterpiece. It all can weigh on young men and women who want to write sports well.

They face a crisis of confidence: so much to remember, so many ways for their stories to careen off course.

I wish I had understood this better when I was younger. I didn’t. I had to discover confidence over time, and I might not have even remembered the importance of confidence had a young sportswriter, a 22-year-old Missouri grad and a Hearst winner, not reminded me of it the other day.

Interrupting his work at a daily newspaper, I asked him what advice he would give to someone who dreamed of writing sports – some college kid who was about to step onto the Columbia, Mo., campus and begin his four-year march toward a bachelor’s degree.

His answer was this: “I would say ‘believe.’ Find someone whose work touches you. Doesn’t matter why. Read it. Study it. Then write. Trust yourself, but understand you have a lot to learn.”

Just to refresh your memory, this isn’t the advice of a Baby Boomer like me or of a hard-bitten editor or of a steer taskmaster in a J-school classroom. No, this advice comes from a contemporary sports journalist, a man who has his degree in tow, a first-rate internship and prospects aplenty in front of him.

In 28 words of journalistic wisdom, he summed up how he got to where he is today.

He would be the last person on earth, however, to say he is where he wants to be. Sure, he’s ahead of most, if not all, sportswriters his age. He’s not cocky that way.  Besides, he’s read enough of the published work of skilled writers like Chris Jones of Esquire, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated and Mitch Albom of The Detroit Free Press to know he has much left to do before he can stack his prose ahead or next to theirs.

But he will get there surely – sooner, not later. He will get there because he believes he will. He’s confident, and he’s backing up that confidence with the drive, the grit and the determination that ensures he moves steadily toward the top of the sportswriting heap.

That’s not his aim, I would say. For he knows the race he’s in is with himself and with his dreams, not with what Albom, Jones, Smith, Mike Sager, Susan Orlean, Skip Hollandsworth, Tom French, David Finkel, Donna Britt, Ken Fuson, Red Smith, Gene Weingarten, Anne Hull, Lane DeGregory, Tom Hallman or anybody else with Pulitzers or magazine awards have done.

Yes, he will learn from these masters – can’t we all? — because it is through their works that he will strengthen his work. Yet he starts with a strong foundation, and the strongest part of that foundation is his belief in himself – an unwavering belief that, if he reads and studies and continues to write, he will make a name for himself in this world of words.

He, too, will tell stories that people will be talking about. He believes this, so do I. He knows this, so do I. And if a writer believes as he does, can anything get in his way if he continues to work to make those beliefs real?

No.