Aniya Sumner joins Press & Sun-Bulletin sports staff

Hello to Press & Sun-Bulletin readers in and around Binghamton. My name is Aniya Sumner, and I am thrilled to be your newest sportswriter.

I’m a “city girl” …or at least I like to think so. I suppose that, relative to Binghamton, that statement might just ring true. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent my youth ducking under turnstiles and trying to understand why walking fast was such a do-or-die situation.

All of my survival instincts slowed to a minimum when I moved to suburban New Jersey as a teenager. My city-like wonderment amped up again when I moved farther north to Massachusetts, where I received my bachelor’s degree in journalism at Boston University.

Although it took me some time to step out of my comfort zone and truly put my writing out there, I eventually got involved with the independent, student-run newspaper The Daily Free Press, where I was lucky enough to report on some of the sports teams’ best endeavors in the Patriot League, including the women’s soccer team’s championship victory in 2024.

Before joining The Daily Free Press, I spent a lot of time as a beat reporter for the less independent WTBU Sports, essentially trying to perfect game recaps and learning how to turn losses into something worth reading about.

Unoriginally speaking, I’ve been in love with sports for as long as I can remember. I imagine the adoration came about once I was strong enough to hold an NBA official Wilson size 7 basketball, which, for context, was almost twice the size of my head at the time.

Having had an affinity for basketball for such a long time, reporting on the sport felt natural. It always seemed as if I’d be doing “tiny me” – whose basketball shorts protruded down my shins, looking a lot more like polyester capri pants – a disservice by not pursuing a career writing about the sport I’ve spent so long adoring.

However, I paid homage to that younger me in 2024 after publishing my first “big girl” story for the well-known sports magazine SLAM – an achievement that didn’t really register in my heart until many months after the fact.

In addition to basketball, I developed an undying love for soccer while living in suburbia – a sentence that the little, too-cool-for-school Canarsie girl would’ve gotten queasy just thinking about. Despite the two sports feeling almost opposite each other, I loved them equally, and with that love, I learned that holding space for the complexities within all sports was paramount and borderline essential for the career I wanted to build.

With this notion, I spent the beginning of this year in London, working for a small startup that focused on padel, a sport and business venture that was utterly foreign to me.

I wanted to do a lot there, to see and accomplish much, but unfortunately, life hit me like a semi-truck right around the same time, as I was dealing with a rare kidney disease along with a few cognitive diagnoses for good measure.

Ever since then, I’ve had a completely different outlook on both life and sports, and I can thankfully say I’m a better writer because of it.

I always strive to create something meaningful in the pieces that I write, and I’ve learned the importance of leaving a place better than how I found it.

So with that, I look forward to having the opportunity to create something meaningful, being a part of the Binghamton community, and working with the Press & Sun Bulletin.

Feel free to contact me at [email protected] or via LinkedIn. Let’s get going.

This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: The Press & Sun-Bulletin: Aniya Sumner joins sports department