Taking to his heels allowed Laois man sporting chance

Plenty of people have run away from Ireland over the years. None more so than Joe Conway, who took to his heels and left the country in 1987 to take up a track scholarship at McNeese State University in Louisiana.

The opportunity to attend college and do something he dearly loved was impossible for Conway to turn down. As well as giving him time to concentrate on his running, it also led ultimately to a career as an online sports journalist and editor covering events such as the Olympics and the World Cup for publications such as the Houston Chronicle in Texas.

With opportunities in journalism declining in recent years, he's now employed as director of print and electronic media at Houston Community College, an educational institution spread across six campuses and with 75,000 students. But Conway is still running competitively and last year represented Ireland in the World Masters Track and Field championships in Budapest.

Originally, from Portlaoise, Co Laois, Conway has now spent more time living in the US than here and, while he didn't plan it that way, he's pretty happy with the way his life has turned out.

“I now work two blocks away from the Greyhound station that I ended up at when I first arrived here, which shows you just how much progress I’ve made over the years,” he jokes.

“I was living in Dublin after leaving school and working in the civil service and spending all my free time running when the opportunity came up to take up the scholarship in Louisiana. It was perfect for me because I was on a career break and didn’t want to go back to my job.

I also wasn’t in a position to go to college because unfortunately my parents found themselves in a situation in which they were making decent money but not enough to put their children through university so I figured this was my one and only chance to do it,” he said.

After completing college, Conway stayed in the south and kept on running. Eventually, he drifted into working for local newspapers where he covered sports of every type.

“I’d be doing something like covering baseball and you’d get all these people wondering why there was some Irish guy reporting on it and whether I understood the rules or not but that wasn’t an issue for me. During my career in journalism, I ended up covering lots of cool stuff and working on some groundbreaking moves into online, including building a website for one newspaper,” he said.

Over the years Conway held various editing and management positions at the Lake Charles American Press and then the Houston Chronicle. While with the Chronicle he worked as online sports editor for the newspapers website, where he won a number of awards for his work, including national recognition from the Online News Association for its online coverage of Super Bowl XXXVIII, which was held in Houston.

"I was heavily involved in looking after online and spent 10 years with the Chronicle where my role was to sort out change management. That involved getting the sports writers to produce content for the website as well as the newspaper. While there, I also led projects such as building a website for the Superbowl," he said.

Funnily enough, given the career I'm in now, another of the projects I worked on while at the Chronicle was developing a high school database for the Houston area, which was a pretty big undertaking given that we have some 200 schools here," Conway added.

Long hours

While he liked his job, the long hours weren’t great given that he had a young family and wanted to get back to running competitively, something that had been put on hold for a few years. “I really feel I did a lot of great things in journalism and that I achieved a lot but about six years ago I realised that things were changing for the worse and were unlikely to get better. When the opportunity came to get out of it and into education, I did and I’ve not looked back since,” he said.

In his current role, Conway manages all the marketing and communications for the Houston Community College including all its online and print publications, its outreach programme, website and so on. Given the large number of students attending the institution, he’s a busy man.

“Community colleges were once seen as a last resort for students who only went to them if they couldn’t get in elsewhere but that’s changed in recent years due to the high cost of education. A lot of students avail of academic transfers so they might do their first two years of college at an institution like ours and then finish at another university,” he said.

“A lot of the skills I picked up working as a journalist were very transferable to a role like my current one. Journalists are often pigeonholed to the degree that a lot of people think that all they can do is write but you pick up a lot of skills working as one, particularly if you’ve also worked online, so there are quite a lot of things you can do,” he added.

Conway makes it back to Ireland once a year and, while he recently became a US citizen, he still feels proud to represent Ireland. Moreover, he still keeps abreast of the running scene here and is a regular contributor to the Irish Runner magazine and the Jumping the Gun website.

“I still consider myself Irish and still feel a great affinity for Ireland,” he said.