The Carleton School of Journalism and Communication.
The name conjures up images of a steely, professional gaze in front of a camera at a disaster site or outside of a courthouse. Names like Nahlah Ayed, Edward Greenspon, and Rosemary Barton come to mind.
Beyond the stern-faced fields of political and foreign reporting lies a flowery, self-satirizing region known merely as “sports.” It is here that Ian Mendes, a graduate of Carleton’s bachelor of journalism program in 1998, has made his mark.
Hailing from Vancouver, the 38-year-old Mendes has an impressive sports broadcasting resume, highlighted by multiple World Series, NHL Stanley Cup finals, and Olympic Games. It wasn’t always that jam-packed, though—there was a time when Mendes was just another shell-shocked 17-year-old entering journalism school.
“Hardly anybody goes from west to east, usually it’s the other way around,” Mendes said. “But I did it. I came here because I thought it would be my best chance to get into sports broadcasting.”
It’s 1:30 p.m. on a snowy Tuesday in the nation’s capital, the city he has come to call his own more than 20 years after first starting school at Carleton, and Mendes is prepping for another edition of his daily drive-time radio show on TSN 1200, the city’s sports radio station.
“It’s funny, I’m from Vancouver and my wife, who I met in journalism school, is from Edmonton—we both thought that it would be four or five years and then back out west,” Mendes said, who bears the good-natured nickname of ‘Panda.’ “We just love it here, it really feels like home—our daughters were born here—and I can’t see us moving.”
In the fast-paced world of sports journalism, Mendes highlights the importance of adhering to deadlines as his key take-away from the four years he spent at Carleton.
“The best part of the program was the simulation of a news room—whether it was TV, radio, or print, they hammered home the importance of deadlines,” he said. “The number one thing was importance of, and attention to, details under a deadline.”
Mendes is a professional. With a bustling family, his own daily radio show, and a parenting column to add some flavour, he experiences golden moments with more regularity than most. One of his all-time favourites, however, came in front of a camera and an audience of twenty classmates at Carleton.
“I was in charge of weather one day, for our mock newscast, and we just built a snowman and incorporated him into the newscast—gave him a voice and everything,” Mendes said. “Your palms would get sweaty, because you’re doing stuff live for the first time, and now I’ve probably done 2,000 live hits and you just kind of chuckle.”
Today, Mendes co-hosts—some would say moderates—the drive-time show on TSN 1200 with former NHL hockey executive Shawn Simpson.
“I wouldn’t have been able to get where I am today without my four years at Carleton,” Mendes said.
After graduating from Carleton in 1998, he worked with the minor-league Ottawa Lynx baseball team in the organization’s public relations department, going so far in the pursuit of a job in sports as dressing up as the team’s mascot on two occasions.
Three years later, he was hired by Sportsnet, one of Canada’s premier sports television stations.
“I always enjoyed writing and radio, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do out of journalism school,” Mendes said. “Having the opportunity to do some anchoring, the opportunity to just do some TV in j-school, really made me fall in love with television.”
Since then, Mendes has reached the pinnacle of North American sports broadcasting at multiple baseball and hockey finals. His motivations have also morphed into family motivations—he wrote in a 2013 Today’s Parent column about the profound impact his daughter’s birth defect had on him personally and professionally.
Most notably, he left his television job at Sportsnet—arguably the highest mountain a Canadian sports journalist can climb—in 2013 for a radio show which offered less glamour and minimal national exposure, but an opportunity for more consistent hours and family time.
