Tuesday, Feb 15, 2022
Dylan Manfre joins the inaugural Maccabi Media Program to cover world’s 3rd largest international multi-sport event
Senior journalism major Dylan Manfre will travel to Israel this summer to cover the 21st Maccabiah Games as part of the inaugural Maccabi Media Program.
Manfre, who has been the sports editor of Rider’s student newspaper, The Rider News, for the past three years, was one of only 14 students nationwide selected for the program. The group will receive professional instruction and mentorship from veteran media professionals while covering the third largest international multi-sport event in the world, behind only the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup.
“The fact that I get to represent Rider and be a part of this program, that means everything to me,” says Manfre, who will travel beyond the U.S. for the first time when he leaves for Israel. “It’s also going to be a fantastic cultural experience and religious experience.”
Since its inception in 1932, the Maccabiah has grown to include nearly 10,000 Jewish athletes from more than 75 countries competing in 40 sports. The new program covering the games is chaired by former Philadelphia 76ers broadcaster Marc Zumoff, who recently retired after 27 years as the television voice of the Sixers.
“After a wide search, we now have some of the best aspiring sports media professionals in the country,” he says. “I anticipate a great learning experience for these young people, while also providing unprecedented coverage of the Maccabiah Games this summer in Israel.”
Manfre, a former high school track and field athlete at Metuchen High School in New Jersey, decided to hang up his running shoes after developing tendonitis in his ankles. He chose to channel his love of sports into a new ambition, reporting on competition instead of participating in it. “I stopped trying to be a great athlete was because I wanted to write and report about those who will be great athletes,” he says.
He started a blog while still in high school, and his ambition helped cultivate an audience of parents, administrators and others seeking stories not covered elsewhere. In 2018, Manfre says he secured permission from Metuchen High School’s principal to travel with the baseball team for its outing against heavily favored Governor Livingston High School. The upset ended Governor Livingston’s season and electrified Manfre’s ambition.
“Metuchen had no business winning that game, and I was the only reporter there,” Manfre says. “It lit a fire for me.”
Manfre published his first article in The Rider News before he even stepped on campus. As an incoming first-year student, he emailed the sports editor, Rob Rose, before the semester had begun to fish for an assignment. His preview of the field hockey season would be the first of many articles covering Rider Athletics.
"Dylan is an outstanding journalism major who has made the most of Rider's engaged learning opportunities from the moment he arrived," says an associate professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism and Media and the faculty adviser to The Rider News. "He is passionate about finding and telling good sports stories and providing gripping game accounts.”
Last year, Manfre and his former co-sports editor Shaun Chornobroff won the 2020-21 Society of Professional Journalists Region 1 Mark of Excellence Award for Sports Writing, which includes colleges and universities in the region stretching from Pennsylvania to Maine. They won for their story about Rider men’s basketball coach Kevin Baggett, who spoke about the Black Lives Matter movement and racial injustice.
In 2020, Manfre and his former co-sports editor Austin Boland-Ferguson covered the MAAC basketball tournament in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which was ultimately canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We were part of the breaking news team that announced the tournament was shutting down,” Manfre says. “It was my biggest goal to cover that tournament. And then the first day we got there, it was canceled."
Manfre will return to the MAAC tournament in March with three other Rider student journalists, Carolo Pascale, Jacob Tiger and Andrew Xon. He also continues to report for The Trentonian, a newspaper that includes coverage of local high school and college sports. Manfre turned his internship there into a regular freelance opportunity.
The Maccabi Media Program will provide even more wide-ranging opportunities to grow while gaining new experience covering international amateur competition, potentially including on-camera sideline reporting and producing video packages.
"The other 13 students come from some of the best journalism schools in the country, and the experience of the broadcast professionals is off the charts," Manfre says. "I'm excited to work with each and every one of them."