By the time I was in the eighth grade, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Growing up an avid football fan, I wanted to be a play-by-play announcer on radio or television.

Men such as Dick Enberg, Don Criqui and Al Michaels spurred my interest in how specific words and tone of voice can relay the mood and flow of action on the field.

As a kid, I used to come up with game results in my head and jot down mock boxscores, then conduct fictional interviews with players in the locker room. I would try to change my voice to distinguish between reporter and player and recorded everything on tape, then play it back to judge how authentic it sounded.

Of course, it all came across as something done by a 10- or 11-year-old kid, but it passed the time.

I attended Clarion University as a communications major and was on the student television and radio stations. My internship came at WPXT-TV, the FOX affiliate in Portland, Maine, of all places. Even at the time, I remember thinking that being a sports anchor at a TV station wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in the booth calling games, but it was a good experience and I got to meet some great people.

My supervisor in Portland typed up for me an encouraging letter of recommendation and only one more semester of college stood between me and the broadcasting world.

Or so I thought.

During my last few months of college, I began to send out resumes to television and radio stations. There had to be at least 30 of them, but replies were few and far between.

By the time I graduated in December of 2000, I had been offered just two radio jobs, one in Ohio and the other in North Carolina. The pay for both would have been low and I figured I would be either living out of my car or not eating. Neither one sounded appealing to me.

I had dabbled in sports writing in both high school and college and ended up catching on with the Herald-Standard, the newspaper in Uniontown, as a stringer.

I covered a lot of high school sports and the home football games for California (Pa.) University in the fall of 2001. It was during one of those games, against Slippery Rock University, when I first met Eagle Sports Editor John Enrietto. Who would have known, right?

Another story I was assigned while at the Herald concerned John Woodruff, a Connellsville native who won a gold medal at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany. It seemed way out of my league, but the story turned out to be a decent one.

This whole time, I was living with my parents, hoping to land a full-time job. The Butler Eagle offered me one in March 2002 and here I am.

Relaying to sports fans the drama of a game, the ups and downs of an athlete's experience, the improbable run of an underdog team — I get to do that every day.

My childhood dream was to do that with the spoken word. My reality is doing it with the written word.

Sometimes Plan B turns into two decades of memories, and hopefully, many more.

Derek Pyda is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.