Wayne Drehs, Visiting Associate Professor of Practice within SJMC, longed to someday become a teacher. 

"I always wanted to teach, and I had done Visiting Professor visits in the past and enjoyed it,” he said. “It just so happened that they (SJMC) were launching the Sports, Media and Culture major at the time, so I talked to Melissa [Tully] and was like, ‘I’d like to try this.’”

Having worked on ESPN’s features and enterprise team for 23 years, Drehs always enjoyed telling stories where athletics intersected with societal issues, ranging from gender equality to global politics and spanning multiple countries, including Egypt, Russia, and Brazil. A three-time Emmy Award winner, Drehs has had an intricate and successful career, but it wasn’t always simple or exciting. Sometimes, it was gut-wrenching.  

In 2006, he reported on the University of North Carolina’s mascot who was killed in a hit-and-run. He followed the aftermath and explored how the mascot’s death, despite the grief it brought, also resulted in lifesaving care.  

“He was an organ donor as a college kid, and we went and did the reporting to find the five individuals who received his organs,” Drehs said.  

The gravity of this story had a nationwide impact, leading 50,000 Americans to register as organ donors and winning Drehs an interview with Oprah Winfrey.  

Since becoming a professor, his schedule has been somewhat calmer with him focusing on teaching students not just how to report on sports, but how to tell the human stories behind the rivalries and multimillion dollar smiles. One such example is his recent Chicago article “Welcome to the PCA Show,” a freelance creation that centers around Pete “PCA” Crow-Armstrong, the baseball center fielder for the Chicago Cubs.  

Rather than focusing on his athletic career, Drehs zoomed in on PCA’s humanity. Known for outbursts whenever he makes a mistake on the field, PCA has gained a reputation for displaying his emotions in a sport that has historically discouraged that.  

In his reporting, Drehs was determined to focus on the man behind the professional athlete. 

“There is almost no sport in which you will fail more than baseball,” he said. “If you have 10 bats and you get three hits, you’re one of the greatest hitters of all time. That means you failed seven times, right? So, the ability to know how to handle failure is a huge part of success in that game, and he’s like, ‘I don’t know how to fail yet.’”  

Drehs said that he was impressed by PCA’s articulate nature and openness about his emotions, especially when he admitted how he gets furious with himself whenever he fails, which is why he has his outbursts. He wrote that PCA has felt ashamed for acting that way in front of children in the crowd, worried that he could be negatively influencing them, despite how much some child fans adore him. In amazing detail, he described how PCA would “toss and turn at night” after making a mistake, despite it being overwhelmingly common in baseball.  

Drehs’s article also caused some controversy. When asked about his feelings towards Chicago, PCA said, “I love Chicago more and more. The people are great. They aren’t just baseball fans who go to the game like Dodgers fans to take pictures and whatever. They care.” 

Drehs laughed as he recounted the fallout of that comment.  

“People in LA lost their minds,” he said. “When that quote came out, everybody grabbed it and for two days, that was kind of the chatter in the baseball world, that Pete was taking shots on LA.”  

Rather than argue that he had been misquoted, PCA admitted to saying it outright, which Drehs appreciated, though it was frustrating for that single quote to be the standout of the article.  

“This [the article] is like 5,000 words of understanding this man,” Drehs sighed. But, the circulation of his article was a success, nonetheless.  

Drehs will be teaching Prep Sports Report and Prep Sports Report Leadership, along with College Athletics: Big Money Tradition, and Feature Reporting and Writing, during the fall 2026 semester. If you have any questions about his course offerings, you can reach him at wayne-drehs@uiowa.edu.