Chris Stiles
Chris Stiles covers the full landscape of high school and college athletics for The Robesonian, with a focus on sustained, ground-level coverage of teams, athletes and programs across southeastern North Carolina. His work stands out for the way he treats local sports as a beat with depth, combining daily game stories, signing and award coverage, and context pieces that explain what these programs mean to their communities. He brings an editor’s eye to the sports report, pairing meticulous box-score detail with clear narratives about milestones, seasons and turning points.
High school and youth sports as a primary beat
Stiles’s core beat is high school athletics, where he follows teams across the county through regular-season play, conference tournaments and postseason runs.
He writes game stories that track momentum and key stretches, such as Fairmont’s fourth-quarter drought against West Bladen and Lumberton’s boys and girls advancing to the United-8 tournament final. His coverage extends beyond varsity teams to middle school competitions, including the county middle school wrestling championship and the first middle school girls track championship meet, treating youth events with the same seriousness as high school contests. He also documents individual trajectories within these programs, covering signing days when athletes like Fairmont’s Stevenson commit to colleges and tracing how their high school careers set up the next step.
Across these stories he consistently reports scores, pivotal plays and coach/player perspectives while situating each game within the broader arc of a season or an athlete’s development.
College sports and UNC Pembroke coverage
Alongside high school work, Stiles covers college athletics in the region, with recurring attention to UNC Pembroke and other North Carolina college programs. His reporting includes features on UNC Pembroke’s youth sports camps, showing how the university’s athletics department engages with younger athletes and the local sports ecosystem.
He also writes about college-bound high school athletes, connecting local programs to institutions such as Louisburg College and Fayetteville Tech when Lumberton and Fairmont standouts sign to play there. In his column on Robeson Community College’s athletics program, he frames the launch of college sports as a win for both the institution and the wider community, explaining how adding teams changes the local sports map and creates new opportunities for area athletes.
When major tournament basketball is on the calendar, he brings in voices like analyst Debbie Antonelli to discuss men’s and women’s favorites, tying national events back to the interests of readers following local teams and players.
Columns, perspective pieces and thematic framing
Beyond straightforward game coverage, Stiles writes columns that place sports events in context and explore their atmosphere and significance. In pieces such as his account of being “with the throng in Thunder Valley,” he uses first-hand reporting to convey the experience of major events, describing crowd dynamics and setting in addition to the competition itself. His column on the Robeson Community College athletics program focuses on impact rather than just results, explaining how the new teams fit into existing high school and college pathways and why they matter to readers invested in the county’s sports scene. In work like “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he frames sports topics around clear themes, using a strong central idea to organize reporting and commentary. Taken together, these pieces show a reporter who moves between straight news, analysis and reflective writing while keeping the emphasis on how sports intersect with institutions and daily life.
Recognition, roundups and editorial role in the sports report
Stiles plays an organizing role in The Robesonian’s sports coverage, contributing to year-end packages and recognition pieces that define what mattered in local athletics over a season.
He assembles and reports All-Conference and All-County honors, such as listings for Fairmont, Red Springs and other schools, turning awards into stories that highlight standout performers and program achievements. In softball coverage, for example, he reports on Rams and Pirates leading All-County selections and traces the narrative of a season before summarizing who rose above the rest. For broader retrospectives like Robeson’s top sports stories of 2025, he contributes editorial perspective on which events were most significant, drawing on his continuous presence at games and familiarity with every program in the county.
His work on the sports desk has earned multiple North Carolina Press Association awards, reflecting the consistency and depth of his coverage across high school and college beats. Through contact notes that list his phone number, email and social handle, The Robesonian positions him as the primary point of connection for sports coverage, reinforcing his central role in shaping how the paper reports on athletics.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is a sports investigative reporter who uses games to examine how power, money and culture shape players, workers, fans and communities. He works in The Washington Post sports section, covering global tournaments, migration, fan culture, sports betting, match-fixing, ownership, NIL money, football safety, participation gaps and the changing culture of women’s basketball. His reporting connects events on the field to decisions in boardrooms, betting markets, government offices and law enforcement. He previously reported for BuzzFeed News and wrote for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly and the Riverfront Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He writes long, deeply reported stories that combine narrative scenes, data analysis, public records, medical records and other documents.