Nick Kelly, formerly of The Tuscaloosa News and now of AL.com, is the fifth recipient of the Edward Aschoff Rising Star Award, named after ESPN’s popular college football reporter who died on Christmas Eve 2019 on his 34th birthday from previously undetected stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the lungs.

The award is given each year by the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) to a promising journalist, no older than 34, who possesses not only the talent and work ethic needed to succeed in the industry, but also the passion to improve it.

“I hope I can carry on his legacy of really having an impact on people and the way he goes about his work,” Kelly said. “I really hope I can continue to do that. It’s a great honor to receive an award with his name on it.”

Kelly, 26, graduated from the University of Missouri in 2020. He was recognized for his outstanding work in football and covering Alabama following the retirement of Nick Saban. Kelly accepted a position as a writer at AL.com ahead of the 2024 football season.

Wilson Alexander of The Advocate was the fourth winner of the award in 2023. Other past winners include former Sports Illustrated reporter and current CBS Sports reporter Richard Johnson (2022), Grace Raynor of The Athletic (2021) and David Ubben of The Athletic (2020).

Kelly joined The Tuscaloosa News in 2021. He worked as an intern at Boston Globe Media and for the Columbia Missourian and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before joining the Alabama Report.

“When I joined The Tuscaloosa News in 2021, you knew that with Nick Saban’s retirement, there was a good chance I would be covering it,” Kelly said. “I think you were always mentally prepared. It was surreal when it happened, but at the same time, I was prepared with the plan of action.”

Kelly thanks his editor at the Tuscaloosa News, Tommy Deas, for helping to implement this plan when news of Saban’s resignation broke on Jan. 10.

Kelly was able to leverage his relationship with Saban’s children – Nicholas and Kristen – to create a profile of post-retirement life for the entire family. Kelly said the key to creating content that stood out this month was asking the right internal questions.

“How can we use the relationships I’ve built during my time here to tell different aspects of the story?” Kelly said. “Everyone was talking about it. Everyone wanted to know more about it. No detail was too small, so it was a question of, ‘How can we flesh out these details?'”

Kelly said he learned two lessons about staying grounded in Alabama from the late Cecil Hurt, the longtime Tuscaloosa News columnist who died in 2021. Kelly said Hurt was always authentic but also worked with the ironic mantra of “everyone else knows more than you.”

“The humility that says, ‘People know more than you,’ is a basic attitude that I try to maintain in my work,” he said.

Kelly said he also appreciates Aschoff, whose legacy lives on with the Rising Star Award.

“I’m very conscious of his legacy and what people say about him,” Kelly said. “To find out that I’m winning an award named after him is really, really cool, knowing what he accomplished in such a short period of time.”

Aschoff, who graduated from the University of Florida in 2008, was a talented storyteller whether he was on camera or writing. And even as his career at ESPN evolved into a role on national television after he moved to Los Angeles in 2017, he still mentored and befriended younger journalists.