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Josh Mlot
Josh Mlot is the sports editor of semoball.com and the Southeast Missourian. He is a graduate of Miami (Ohio) University and has spent the last eight years covering high school and college sports in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. Missouri is the seventh different state he has called home. If you ask him where he's from, the answer is, "all over the place."

Josh has covered legends like Joe Paterno, Hall of Famers like Brett Favre, future-pros like Matt Adams (when he was just an amateur with local tall tales about his ability to hit the stitches off a baseball) and multiple All-Americans. He has covered undefeated teams and winless teams; budding prospects and total busts.

Now, the land of semoball.

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Laying down roots

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2015, at 8:37 PM

I like to know what I'm getting in to, so I made sure to do some quick research when I sat down to write my first words for semoball.com and the Southeast Missourian. I looked up what Rachel Crader wrote when she sat down to do the same thing, way back in 2009.

That was a long time ago. Osama Bin Ladin was still alive, Barack Obama had been President for only a year and nobody had ever seen an iPad before. Most kids never had heard of dubstep, LeBron James was still ringless in Cleveland, they still made movies that didn't star comic book superheroes and, most importantly, One Direction had not yet formed, which means that Rachel could not have yet purchased the One Direction dry erase boards she graciously left for me in the sports editor's desk.

If you're reading this, you're probably aware of the work Rachel did here. She had things I do not, namely a cute story -- which she wrote about in that first column -- about how she connected with the Southeast Missourian, as well as a personal history with the area.

I've been a nomad my entire life. Missouri is the seventh different state I've lived in, and I've made interstate moves eight times. Most recently I called Mississippi home. It was a place I never expected to end up, and I spent four and a half years there making friends, starting a family and working really hard to provide great sports coverage. On whatever winding road that fate has led me, I've now come to Cape Girardeau to try to do the same thing.

Rachel left big shoes to fill here, building a great sports staff and strong newspaper coverage and breaking ground with the Semoball Awards. I hope that what makes me different -- being an outsider -- will help me continue the evolution of semoball.com and the Southeast Missourian sports section. My goal is not to completely change the good work being done here, but to continue to shape it and find ways to provide even deeper, broader looks at the stories that come out of our local sports community.

Six years later we can debate whether James' "decision" or dubstep or One Direction have actually made the world a better place. My hope is that when we look back years from now we will have no doubt that what we're doing here with our website and newspaper are even better than what already has been done.

Have things about our coverage you've loved? Things you want to see done differently? Let us know. I can, thanks to Rachel, jot all suggestions down alongside the faces of One Direction.

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