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Chris Lowe, ESPN Senior Writer
Nick Kelly, formerly of The Tuscaloosa News and now with AL.com, is the fifth recipient of the Edward Ashkoff Rising Star Award, named after the beloved ESPN college football reporter who died on his 34th birthday in 2019 of undiagnosed lung cancer. 4 Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The award is presented annually by the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) to a promising journalist over the age of 34 who not only has the talent and work ethic to succeed in the business, but also the passion to make it better.
“I hope that I can live up to his legacy by really impacting people and the way he did his work,” Kelly said. “I really hope I can continue that. It’s an honor to have an award with his name on it.”
Kelly, 26, graduated from the University of Missouri in 2020. He was recognized for his outstanding work on the Alabama football beat and coverage following Nick Saban’s retirement. Kelly has accepted a writing position with AL.com prior to the 2024 football season.
Wilson Alexander of The Advocate was the fourth winner of the award in 2023. Other past winners include former Sports Illustrated reporter and current CBS Sports reporter Richard Johnson (2022), The Athletic’s Grace Raynor (2021) and The Athletic’s David Ubben (2020).
Kelly joined The Tuscaloosa News in 2021. He worked as an intern with Boston Globe Media and worked for the Columbia Missourian and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before playing for the Alabama Beat.
“When I joined The Tuscaloosa News in 2021, you know with Nick Saban’s retirement, there was a perfect opportunity for me to cover it,” Kelly said. “I think you’re always mentally prepared for it. It was surreal when it happened, but at the same time I was prepared with a plan of action.”
When news of Saban’s retirement broke on January 10, Kelly credited his editor at the Tuscaloosa News, Tommy Dees, with helping to execute that plan.
Kelly was able to use her relationship with Saban’s children – Nicholas and Kristen – to create a profile of life after retirement for the entire family. Kelly said the key to creating content that stands out that month is asking the right internal questions.
“How can we use the relationships I’ve built over my time to tell different sides of the story?” Kelly said. “Everybody was talking about it. Everybody wanted to know about it. No detail was too small, so it was a matter of, ‘How can we cultivate those details?'”
Kelly said he took two lessons from the late Cecil Hart, a longtime columnist for The Tuscaloosa News who died in 2021, to keep the Alabama beat grounded. Kelly said the hurt was genuine throughout but the beat also worked with the tongue-in-cheek mantra of “everybody else knows more than you.”
“The humility of ‘people know more than you do’ is a mindset I try to keep in my work,” he said.
Kelly said he also has admiration for Aschoff, whose legacy has been perpetuated with the Rising Star Award.
“I’m well aware of his legacy and seeing what people have said about him,” Kelly said. “It’s really, really great to find out I’ve won an award named after her because I know what she’s achieved in such a short amount of time.”
Aschoff, a 2008 graduate of the University of Florida, was a gifted storyteller, whether he was on camera or creating written pieces. And even when his career at ESPN blossomed into a national television role when he moved to Los Angeles in 2017, he still mentors and befriends young reporters.
