Meet Members of the Roundtable
Abe Schwadron – Sneaker Editor at SLAM Magazine
Twitter: @abe_squad/Instagram: abe_squad
I’m the sneaker editor at SLAM Magazine, officially under the title of Assistant Editor/KICKS, and when I’m not handling kicks coverage for SLAMonline, you can find me chasing down NBA feature stories for the mag each month. I also made major writing and research contributions to the forthcoming book “SLAM KICKS Presents: Basketball Sneakers that Changed the Game” (coming in March!), have covered the Nets on a freelance basis for NBA.com on occasion and run SLAM’s new football site, TDdaily.com on an everyday basis. I grew up on the Maryland side of the DMV, and my parents somehow knew to keep me laced in Jordans and Iversons in my formative years despite never being anywhere near as big into hoops as I was. I played a little JV ball in high school before studying journalism at Northwestern University, where I once scored 30 points in an intramural game against the Jewish fraternity’s B-team. I wound up at SLAM after interning at SI.com and ESPN Radio, and then relentlessly pestering the staff at SLAM until they said “Fine, you can intern if you stop e-mailing us” in the fall of 2011, which eventually led to a full-time gig. In the past calendar year, I played both basketball and flag football against Kevin Durant. In the next calendar year, I want to add a pair of Reebok Answer Vs to my sneaker collection.
George Kiel – Associate Editor at NiceKicks.com
Twitter: @geokthree/Instagram: geokthree
I’m the associate editor at NiceKicks.com. Since 2008, I’ve had my hands in pretty much everything here, including day-to-day staff writing, conducting interviews, editing, representing the company at media events and many other things. I’m in charge of our Kicks On Court column and have expanded it to our 2-year-old Kicks On Court Weekly Recap show. I’m also the host of our Sneak Peek series, where we visit the homes of various celebrities, athletes and sneaker enthusiasts to get an in-depth look inside their sneaker closets/collections. I studied Mass Communications/Print Journalism in college at Texas State University, where I also played on the basketball team and wrote for the Sports section of the school newspaper – University Star – simultaneously. As for sneakers, they have always been a by-product of my love for basketball. I have been playing basketball since the age of five and have always paid attention to what people wore on the court. Some of my all-time favorites on-court shoes include the Nike Air Zoom T-Bug Flight, the Nike Zoom Flight Turbine, the Nike Zoom Kobe V, the adidas Pro Model, the Air Jordan 11 and the Nike Hyperflight. All of those shoes have graced my feet at some point during my basketball career from middle school to college. I also have a weird thing for grey shoes. 75% of my shoe collection is colored in grey.
Casey Holdahl – Portland Trail Blazers In-House Beat Reporter
Twitter: @CHold/Instagram: caseyholdahl
Casey Holdahl here and I’m the in-house beat reporter for the Portland Trail Blazers. This is my seventh season with the team, though this is the first year that I’m covering the team exclusively for all 82 games at both Trailblazers.com and ForwardCenter.net. I’m at every practice, every shootaround and every game, both home and away, filling the reporting space in between what you would get from an old fashioned newspaper beat reporter and your typical rah-rah NBA team site.
As for how I got here, I started out founding one of the first Trail Blazers blogs, which eventually became Blazersedge.com. No one actually got paid to blog back then, so I turned over the site to Dave, who does wonderful job of running it now, for a job at OregonLive.com, which is the online home for The Oregonian newspaper. I got bumped up to their Blazers Blog duty after the guy who was writing it, my dude Eric Marentette, left OregonLive to work for Kobe Bryant’s now mostly defunct creative agency, Zambezi Ink. I did that for about two years before joining the Trail Blazers as a web content manager. I’ve been doing some form of content creation, be it written, video, or social, for the team ever since.
But I’ve also been focusing a part of my reporting on what players are wearing on court. Seeing as how the Nike World Headquarters and adidas North American Headquarters are located my backyard, I figured the interest was there to take a team-specific approach to the shoe game. I’ve been doing that for the past three seasons, and I’d like to think I’m ever-so-slightly responsible for more teams realizing there’s great interest among the public in NBA fashion.
My favorite shoe really varies on a month-to-month basis. My first love has to be the Jordan 5. We didn’t have much money when I was a kid, and growing up in the Oregon wine country when it was still rural, the idea of spending money on sneakers was a complete non-starter. But my parents had a friend who was a secretary at Nike back in the early 90s, and one day they came back from a party at her house with a pair of comp original 5s that she had in her closet. They were a size too big, but I couldn’t have loved them more. I remember going to one of those events put on by the local park & rec department your parents dropped you off at in the summertime to keep you from accidentally burning their house down in those 5s and feeling like a complete badass, which, for a pale, bucktooth, unathletic kid from the lowlands, was a rarity. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t kick myself for not holding on to those.
My favorite pair right now would probably be the NikeiD Pendleton Roshes my wife bought me for Christmas. Made with wool sheered from sheep here in Oregon and with iconic Pendleton design on a contemporary shoe like the Roshe, it all just comes together for me. But ask me again in a month and I’d probably tell you a that the adidas ZX700 is my favorite. Been wearing those a lot lately. And if anyone at Nike would hook me up with any of the Oregon Jordans (Allen School of Journalism and Communications, Class of 2003!) they would instantly become my favorite pair. Just throwing that out there. Get at me Tinker.
Christopher Cason – Writer for Examiner.com
Twitter: @C4DUNK/Instagram: c4dunk
I’ve been covering the Chicago Bulls for the Examiner.com for five years now. I report news, game recaps and other stories pertaining to the team. I also write for HOOP magazine and Sneaker Freaker magazine and have contributed to SLAM, Sole Collector, Counterkicks and Modern Notoriety. My start in covering the NBA came from my mentor/brother Anthony Gilbert, who introduced me to my first writing gig at a site called MVN.com. From there, the Examiner.com started in 2008 and I was contacted about coming aboard. The only way I was leaving MVN was if the Examiner would fight for me to be credentialed. They did, I’m there, and while the Examiner doesn’t help pay the bills, the access it gives me to the opportunities to work with others to tell stories – and help pay the bills – is priceless. There’s also the blessing of being able to cover a franchise that I grew up watching. I walk past the Jordan statue before each home game and make sure to step on the hardwood every game I work because it’s definitely a dream come true and something I don’t take for granted. My favorite shoe today remains the Air Jordan V. I still remember seeing my uncle in the original Black/Silver pair back in ’91. The flash of the 3M on the tongue instantly caught my eye and changed my mindset on the shoes I wanted to wear going forward, even though my mom wouldn’t get me my first pair of Jordan’s until I was 12 and it was the AJ XIII’s. A lot of my favorite models are from the 90’s because of the design stories behind them and the things that were done in them. The Royal Blue Foamposite, the Nike Air Zoom GP, Nike Hyperflights, Adidas Pro Model, Air Force 180, Air More Uptempo, Air Max Penny 1, Reebok Question.
