In ninth grade, it started with a magazine.

No, not that one.

I'd just picked up my first Condé Nast Traveler, and somewhere in the glossy pages was a story about a college intern dropped into Spain with a
round-trip ticket and $28. He bartered, he scrambled, he made it home with a story.

I remember thinking, “Why should white people get to have all the fun?”

I didn’t really have the words for it then, but the question was never really about Spain or race for that matter. It was about access. Who gets invited to see the world and who gets to feel at home once they’re there.

Sports answered that question for me before travel ever did. In high school, basketball was my passport to the world — Russia, Romania, Hungary, places a kid from just south of Atlanta had no business being and yet somehow belonged. I studied ethnography and sports business in college, studied abroad in Istanbul, and was offered a job with the Turkish national team, which I turned down. A decision that still haunts me to this day.

I led marketing for YMCAs in Florida and LEGOLAND in Atlanta, and eventually took on brand management for the YMCA's national office in Chicago, doing stand-up on the side the whole time. Then I made the jump to Los Angeles as a comedy writer on a late-night show, where the on-camera work came with sweet, sweet residual checks. IYKYK.

For a while there, I thought I was in the driver's seat, steering a career in the direction I wanted it to go.

The pandemic closed the first route. The writer’s strike closed the one after that. I even thought I had found a new home as an editor at EBONY when three years in, I got the “we’re restructuring” call. Every time, I treated it the same way: head down, find the road, get back on course.

But if the above was not enough of an origin story, September of 2025, a near-fatal car accident landed me in the ER of Grady Memorial Hospital. It was there, between the measured beeps of the EKG machine, that it became clear: the detours were never the interruption. They were the trip.

So I stopped fighting them.

That's where Off Course began to take root — a home for stories and brand-building that live outside the obvious path, based on a personal life that was less than obvious.

Sports, style, and the rituals people collect to feel and express a sense of belonging.

If you find yourself a bit Off Course, but despair. This may be the beginning of your story.