After the terrifying Texas natural disaster prevented our initial source from communicating with us and foiled our first story idea, Baharan and I decided to move back to the drawing board.
We contacted everyone we knew, asking if they knew of any Cal Poly students who were doing something notable or interesting. This is such a whirlwind part of the story process. My mind was racing the entire day, back and forth between a Cal Poly magician alumnus to a stained glass maker to a TikTok dancing star. Finally we stumbled upon Derek Sit, a friend of a friend of Baharan who ran a basketball card breaking business on Instagram, @sitbros_breaks.
I was skeptical at first because I know absolutely nothing of sports and it was taking us an embarrassing amount of time to understand what it is that Derek does. (I can’t even count how many times I asked: “And where does that come from? How does that work?”)
The one thing we did know for sure: this topic was incredibly newsworthy, with stories upon stories piling up about the sports card industry boom and the recent sales of cards for millions of dollars.
We set up an outdoor interview with Derek where he explained hobby breaking to us. He talked about his love for the sport, how he sets up his breaks, running the business with his brother, and where he thinks the trading card industry will go from here. We wanted to hear about how he feels when he opens a pack on Instagram Live and how he got the idea to start his business.
Like many others, Derek turned to card collecting when he no longer had consistent opportunities to play his favorite sport. “Basketball will always be a huge part of my life and I don’t get much opportunity nowadays to play. I guess breaking these boxes for people is my basketball fill,” Derek said.
Our interview went well and we thought the content we ended up with was excellent. Our mic wasn’t cooperating so we had Derek hold a phone on his lap to record as well as the video, and we were glad we did. The wind was not kind to us.
Afterwards, Derek sent us photos from his childhood, videos of himself playing basketball, with his family, with his favorite card, and everything in between. We’ve been fortunate to have such cooperative subjects. Baharan decided to embed Instagram posts from Derek’s Instagram and create a timeline of how a break works to make sure it was clear to readers.
“I thought the timeline would be a good supplement to the story,” Baharan said. “We wanted to make this confusing topic a little more clear.”
Baharan and I edited my draft together and gave each other as much feedback as we could during our hellish week 10. We input our story into WordPress and submitted our video and interactives, and just like that, our senior project was done. We have taken almost every single major class together over four years–but that’s a story for another time.
We are so proud of our story and we had so much fun talking with Derek. We learned a lot and we hope readers will understand the concept of hobby breaking faster than us. Like our first story, we hope this minimally COVID-related story will pique the interest of some readers and give them a much-needed break.