FASTIFF | Three Seasons of Growth

Since I learned about their existence, I’ve always looked forward to writing a senior column. 

Unfortunately, it turns out that three years of sports coverage has not given me great first-person perspective writing skills. So instead of writing a well-constructed reflection on my time at The Sun, I’ll resort to something more my speed: a meandering feature article. Here’s the first few paragraphs of How Eli Fastiff Became a Sun Senior Editor.

Having grown up reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Sporting Green” daily and regularly falling asleep to Giants baseball on KNBR, I arrived in Ithaca my freshman year with a strong opinion of what strong sports reporting and coverage looks like.

I wasn’t afraid to complain to my friends when I felt like The Sun wasn’t living up to those standards. By my sophomore fall, my friends told me to put up or shut up. Either write the timely recaps you complain about the absence of, or stop the whining. 

So, I joined The Sun (which at that point only involved a friend adding me to the slack) and selected my beat: women’s hockey. 

I started by writing weekly recap articles for home games, but I began adding on additional pieces that spring which included weekly previews and individual game recaps, then consistent road game recaps, feature articles and Professional Women’s Hockey League coverage the following season. 

In the spring of my junior year, we published The Sun’s first ever women’s hockey NCAA Tournament supplement (right as we switched websites, so frustratingly my Jessica Campbell ’14 feature was solely available in print for a few weeks), and I took a whirlwind trip to cover the team at the Frozen Four in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Towards the end of that season, I was elected as a senior editor (despite never previously serving as an editor, which seems like an oversight from whoever decides eligibility for this type of thing) when Jane McNally ’26 and I spun off hockey coverage from the rest of the sports department.

Senior year I continued to publish features (including in our inaugural Hockey Issue) and our weekly blend of a preview and reporters notebook (our ‘Cornell Notes’), but I spent game days at Lynah Rink a row above the written media as the color commentator on Cornell’s ESPN+ broadcasts. Still, I got plenty of beat writing in, including on road trips to Brown University, Yale University, Colgate University and ultimately Lake Placid.

Early on in my three seasons covering the team it became clear how unique a program women’s hockey is at Cornell. Not only did the group have incredibly high expectations of winning and a visible hatred of losing (especially to Colgate), but through interacting with the team the closeness of the players and the strength of the program’s community became obvious. 

The run to the Frozen Four — which included an epic triple OT semifinals win, a conference championship and record setting attendance — and this season’s struggles all were worth capturing because of the pure passion behind every part of the program, from the fans to the players and coaches. 

As goaltender Annelies Bergmann ’27 told me at the start of this season, the Ithaca and Cornell communities make Lynah Rink “truly like no other place.”

Unlike my level of coverage of the women’s hockey team, some things don’t change. I’m sending this article to my editors late Thursday night/early Friday morning, hours after I promised it would be ready. And despite the delay, I still have managed to neglect a handful of job applications. 

This Thursday night routine, spending the evening working on an edition of Cornell Notes instead of homework or job applications, has become such a staple of Sun hockey coverage that Jane and I have a meme we have at times sent back and forth on a weekly basis. 

This is a good excuse for me to shout out Jane, who has edited nearly every article I have published and has made me sound like a much better writer than I actually am. More times than I can count, I have used an article topic or style of hers as inspiration in my own coverage, and her ability to know the right thing to do in any journalistic situation has been nearly infallible.

While my time at The Sun has focused on women’s hockey, my Cornell sports media experience has remained fairly balanced. In addition to my on-air time in Lynah Rink, I’ve called nearly every home men’s soccer game of the past three years on ESPN+ with Jacob Janco ’26 (Cornell went a combined 14-0-2 when we were on the call together), dozens of softball and baseball games and even a semi-nightmarish women’s basketball blowout loss. 

To avoid turning this reflection into a treatise, I’ll end with an attempt at some quick thank yous. 

Thank you to Jane, her sports editor successor Alexis Rogers ’28 and all the other Sun editors I’ve worked with over the past three years, Jacob, Lydia Lekhal ’27 (another member of the Big Red Sports NetworkxSun club) and the rest of the Broadcasting Department at BRSN, Aaron Kelly, Marshall Haim, John Lukach and the entire Cornell Athletics broadcasting staff. 

Thank you to women’s hockey head coach Doug Derraugh ’91 — who for the first year of my time on the beat ended every interview with some version of “thank you for your coverage” — and to all the other coaches and student-athletes who let me tell their stories; I can’t remember a single interview I had with a Cornell athlete who came off as anything but happy to chat with me, even after difficult losses. 

Lastly, I want to thank everyone who has read my work, especially those who have reached out with feedback or comments. Getting to engage with readers, parents, athletes and the broader women’s hockey community at Cornell has always been a wonderful experience, and I truly hope the community will continue to embrace The Sun’s coverage of the team regardless of whose name is on the byline.

---