Evan Quarnstrom
Evan Quarnstrom is a Senior Writer at The Inertia who uses surf and outdoor sports coverage to connect performance, culture, and the changing coastlines those sports depend on. He specialises in surfing, travel, the outdoors, and the NBA, and has more than nine years of reporting experience across these areas. His work stands out for blending on-the-ground surf journalism, data-driven investigation, and first-person travel reporting rather than straight results or highlight recaps.
Surfing culture, competition and Olympic coverage
Quarnstrom’s core beat is surfing, where he covers everything from daily news to long-form features and investigations for The Inertia.
He reported surfing at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Tahiti, producing interviews, daily news, op-eds, and investigative pieces that reached hundreds of thousands of readers. One of his signature stories from that assignment was a data-driven report on the removal of a surf judge, using event data and governance context to examine whether the decision was justified and why it mattered for the sport.
His background as Marketing and Media Manager for the International Surfing Association from 2015 to 2021 gives him insider knowledge of surf federations, judging, and event politics, which he now applies to coverage of Olympic surfing and elite contests. That experience includes planning and implementing communications strategy for surfing’s debut at Tokyo 2020, work that helped move the sport into the upper tier of media visibility among Olympic federations despite a small athlete pool. As a result, his competition pieces tend to read as both event coverage and explanations of how decisions by officials, brands, and governing bodies shape surfers’ careers and the sport’s public image.
Alongside major events, Quarnstrom profiles surf communities and frontier zones for the sport, such as long-form work on Madagascar as “surfing’s final frontier” and other remote destinations that are still emerging on the global surf map. He also files shorter features built around standout clips and surfers, including coverage of Mikey February threading sand-bottom tubes on a twin fin, which show his ability to frame a single session within broader trends in style, equipment, and wave selection. Across this surf beat, he focuses on the intersection of competition, cultural identity, and access to quality waves rather than simple contest summaries.
Coastal environments and sand-driven conflicts
A second strand in Quarnstrom’s work is coastal environment reporting, often centred on sand, erosion, and infrastructure that affects beaches and surf breaks. His portfolio includes coverage of a “sand mystery” linked to protecting Ocean Beach, examining how sediment behaviour could influence efforts to safeguard critical infrastructure while preserving the shoreline. In related work highlighted by the San Francisco Standard, he reports on a proposed $175 million seawall designed to protect a threatened sewage plant, focusing on scientists’ concerns that the project could destroy the beach it is meant to defend.
Quarnstrom also documents conflicts where surfers, local government, homeowners, and environmental groups clash over manipulating rivers and sandbars to create surfable waves. His reporting on Aliso Creek describes a showdown over manually breaching a sand berm to generate a standing river wave, laying out the competing interests of boardriders seeking a unique break, officials enforcing environmental and safety rules, and residents worried about impacts on their coastline.
These pieces distinguish him from a generic sports reporter by treating surf spots as ecosystems and contested public spaces, with the sporting experience only one piece of a larger environmental and policy story.
Travel narratives and global surf communities
Quarnstrom regularly writes travel-driven stories that use his own journeys to follow surf and skimboarding communities around the world. His portfolio and personal site describe reporting across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, including coverage of how the Sri Lankan financial crisis affects small businesses and how people in Lebanon turn to ocean sports amid war, inflation, and government negligence. These stories position surfing and other ocean activities as tools for resilience and joy in harsh political and economic conditions rather than lifestyle escapism alone.
At Lookout Santa Cruz, he contributes first-person pieces about surf and skimboarding cultures that trace how local scenes connect to a global network of riders. He has written about leaving a favourite surfboard halfway around the world as a gift to a surfer in Madagascar, using that act to explore the bond between surfers and their boards and the unequal access to equipment between regions. Other articles follow extended solo travel through places such as Sri Lanka, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia, reflecting on perceived danger, actual risk, and what sustained time in unfamiliar cultures offers to traveling athletes and writers.
This travel beat gives communications-heavy stories a strong narrative backbone and shows Quarnstrom’s habit of grounding analysis in lived experience with the communities he covers.
NBA and basketball storytelling
Beyond surf and the outdoors, Quarnstrom maintains a clear NBA sub-beat. His author biography and public profiles note that he specialises in covering the league and has worked as a blogger focused on the Golden State Warriors. He carries that interest into freelance work for outlets such as Blue Man Hoop, adding basketball analysis and team-focused storytelling to a portfolio otherwise dominated by surf and travel.
His NBA pieces sit alongside his ocean reporting rather than replacing it, giving him a broader sports lens than many niche surf writers. Taken together, his coverage of the Warriors, long-term engagement with #DubNation, and attention to league narratives mark him as a writer who treats basketball with the same mix of culture, fandom, and performance analysis that he brings to surf. This combination of deep surf expertise, environmental reporting, global travel narratives, and NBA coverage is what differentiates Quarnstrom from a generic sports reporter on The Inertia’s masthead.
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.