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CoSIDA Goodwill & Wellness Committee
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Communicators Outside the Lines Feature Series
This is the next profile in a series entitled
Communicators Outside the Lines: Better Yourself, Better Your Community produced by the CoSIDA Goodwill & Wellness Committee. Read past profiles at
CoSIDA.com/CommunicatorsOTL.
WE NEED YOUR IDEAS!
If you have any ideas for this series, which will revolve around CoSIDA member volunteerism and health and wellness, please contact Goodwill and Wellness Committee chair
Chris Mitchell, Washington University in St. Louis Assistant AD for Communications, at (618) 560-9280 or
mitchell@wustl.edu.
Q&A with A.J. O'Hagan
Yeshiva University, Sports Information Director
by Kevin Maloney – Jones College, Assistant AD for Sports Information
CoSIDA Goodwill and Wellness Committee member
Yeshiva University fourth-year sports information director
Anthony “AJ” O’Hagan faces a daily battle. O’Hagan lives with autism, a condition that affects more than 3.5 million Americans and 1 in 59 births.
Diagnosed at three-years-old, he’s lived with autism his entire life. O’Hagan’s younger brother, Nicky, and goddaughter, Natalie, were also diagnosed around the age of one.
Autism is defined as a neurological condition that's marked by differences in learning styles, passionate interests in specific subjects, repetitive motion and sometimes difficulty with language and communication.
If there’s one thing that stood out the most during my interview with AJ, it was the word stereotype. In our nearly 40-minute conversation, that word was used several times.
The stereotype is that people like AJ can’t play sports, aren’t athletic enough, are odd or strange and struggle in social situations. AJ and others living with his condition, however, prove every day that when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.
O'Hagan (fourth from right) with his "Autism Awareness" team at the 2019 CoSIDA 5K in Orlando.
Born and raised in The Empire State, O’Hagan moved to the Bronx when he was 11 and has been there ever since. He received his undergraduate from Utica College in 2011 and his masters in sports business management from Manhattanville College in 2013.
O’Hagan’s introduction to sports was when the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994. He was five. He remembers his parents waking him up the next morning telling him they won, and he watched the VHS recording of the game, felt the emotion and excitement and became a sports fan that day.
O’Hagan has worked in the profession for six years and has also enjoyed his fair share of fun playing intramural wiffleball, basketball, floor hockey, flag football and indoor soccer when he was an undergraduate at Utica College.
“I’ve been a part of a few championship teams,” O’Hagan said. “But the big one for me was at the end of my sophomore year, my friends and I formed an “Autism Awareness” team for all sports that we played in. We won a championship in wiffleball that first year and that was a pretty big defining moment for me.”
He still plays wiffleball in an annual O’Hagan Fathers vs Sons/Daughters game. He also swims a lot, competing in long distance and freestyle for the American Turner Club at the Throggs Neck Interclub swim races against all the beach clubs in his neighborhood.
Q: What challenges do you face on a day-to-day basis living with autism?
O'Hagan: Social situations generally make me a little uncomfortable. I’ve gotten better with it over the years, but I always have that paranoia that people are watching me and judging my every move. I’m not a fan of being in front of a crowd of people and my anxiety goes way up in a room full of people.
Q: What’s the biggest misconception about autism?
O'Hagan: I just think people need to be less judgmental. It’s a very diverse world. People with disabilities need to be accepted for who they are. I’ve read horror stories with my friends and family about how autistic people are treated in public. I knew one mother back in Utica whose son always gets picked on by other people. He gets stared at and people mumble insults under their breath. We have to be better than that.
Q: You started an Autism Awareness Club in January 2009. How did that come about?
O'Hagan: I learned a lot about autism just by growing up with my brother and having a lot of positive and negative experiences growing up autistic, myself. Nicky and I each had our ups and downs because of our autism. I struggled in social situations when I was younger. When Nicky was a kid, he occasionally had meltdowns in public. Everyone kept staring at my mom when those meltdowns happened. People around us probably thought Nicky was just being a brat. The thing is, when autistic people throw tantrums, it can be triggered by being too hot, having an uncomfortable collar on your shirt, or being frustrated in general.
I felt like I needed to help make people aware of what autism truly was, to let people know all the gifts that a person with autism has, his or her talents, interests, the negative parts of autism, how can you tell if someone has autism, etc. So my friends and I formed the club and did lectures, fundraising events, movie nights and more to raise awareness. It was active for the last two years I was in college and a couple of years after I graduated."
O’Hagan still does independent lectures now, mainly speaking to young children with autism in their classrooms. He’s also sat in and has been a panelist for some conferences around his community. And every April, with it being Autism Awareness month, he posts one fact a day on social media regarding autism on his personal Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, mainly how to properly diagnose someone, how can you tell if someone has it, what exactly it is and things like that.
O'Hagan recruiting students at Utica College.
Q: What advice do you have for other autistic people who want to work in sports but are maybe a little nervous about taking that leap of faith and go for it?
O'Hagan: I would tell them to get out of your comfort zone, but don’t try to force anything. Try to become involved and participate in as many events as you can and to network in general. Relax, be natural and have real conversations. Don’t be worried about facial expressions or anything like that. If you have dreams, pursue them. If you work hard at it and continue to build yourself up, you can achieve anything you want.
Q: What initially got you interested in working in sports?
O'Hagan: I filmed games as a work study under Gil Burgmaster at Utica College. I interned under him for a semester and pretty much learned what sports information was all about by working next to him. I fell in love with the job and it became my goal to become a sports information director from that point on.
Q: Living in New York and being a big Rangers fan, was hockey the first sport you started working with?
O'Hagan: Oh yes. I was the video coordinator for the Utica College men’s hockey team and I did a lot of video breakdown that also played a role in me becoming an SID as well. I was so involved, going to every home game, traveling with the team and looking at the standings, that it made me imagine how cool it would be to work with 15-20 sports at the same time and not just hockey.
Q: Would your dream job be to cover hockey on the college or professional level?
O'Hagan: Yes and no. I like hockey, but I enjoy learning new sports. For instance, when I first became the assistant SID at Lehman, I didn’t know too much about volleyball or soccer, but when I started learning more about them I really started loving covering those sports in addition to other sports I learned about while at Lehman, such as cross country and tennis.
O'Hagan at the YAI Autism Conference.
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