Interested in writing for Golden State of Mind? Here’s how to apply.

Golden State of Mind is looking for passionate Golden State Warriors fans to join our team and help us as we facilitate community discussion about the team that is ruining the NBA one sinister signing at a time.

So if you’re eagerly searching for a public outlet to share your thoughts about the Warriors while gaining support from a team of people as you do so, read on to find out how to apply!

Who we’re looking for

• Fans with strong opinions, a sense of humor and unique perspectives about the team, which they are able to express effectively and defend persuasively in writing.
• Clear thinkers with the ability to identify significant stories, synthesize information, and concisely articulate the impact of news events on the team.
• Quantitative minds who can clearly explain basketball analytics to a casual fan.
• Emerging writers who take genuine pride in their writing and want greater exposure for their efforts.
• Team players who want to contribute to the improvement of the Golden State of Mind community.
• Community members interested in making Golden State of Mind a more inclusive place for minorities, women, and people of all cultures, religions, and sexual orientation.
• Basketball minds that are enthusiastic about ALL THINGS Warriors.

What we’re looking for

Perhaps even moreso than usual, we’re not in a place of dire need for writers right now, but I occasionally receive emails from people interested in volunteering with us and like to open it up for submissions during the offseason when there’s considerably more downtime. Although I’ll always find space for the most creative/insightful writers, a small sampling of the type of things that we’d be particularly interested in people volunteering for are the following:

• Analytics/statistics-driven commentary (e.g. data analysis, advanced statistics, and data visualization)
• Copy editing
• Video/multimedia skills
• Salary cap expertise
• Sneaker heads...because...what if Steph Curry comes out with more “straight fire” shoes?
• Social media talent

The bottom line is that anything at all that you believe would help facilitate Warriors fans sharing their enthusiasm with on this site is welcome. The more creative you are in sharing your love for the Warriors, the better off the community is.

How to apply

1. Tell me about yourself: Send me an email stating your interest in joining the GSoM team, addressing the following four things:

• Make the subject line: “GSoM application: [your last name]”
• Describe your personality as a writer and what first drew you to the GSoM community.
• Describe how/what you will contribute to the GSoM team based on what you know about our site/staff/social media presence.
• Describe what you hope to gain from joining the GSoM team.

(1a. If you’re already an active member of our community, please include your user name as well so I know who you are and can review your genius comments of the past.)

2. Show me a writing sample: I always get a lot of really strong applicants, so writing samples always go a long way in sorting out who I might to add to our team. You have two options for writing samples:

• Send me links to 2-3 published writing samples about the Warriors that represent the type of contributions you imagine yourself making to GSoM. Those samples could be published work about the Warriors at another blog/site OR FanPosts you’ve written here at GSoM. Either way, please try to pick articles about the Warriors that actually resemble what you’d like to contribute to GSoM.

OR

• Attach a written response to the following question:

”Which of the new additions (DeMarcus Cousins, Jacob Evans, Jonas Jerebko) or expected departures (Omri Casspi, JaVale McGee, Zaza Pachulia, David West, Nick Young) will have the biggest impact on the Warriors’ regular season performance?”

(If you have writing samples that are not about the Warriors that illustrate more about your writing ability/style, feel free to send them along with a response to the question above — it’s always interesting to see the breadth of one’s writing ability, but it doesn’t help me if I don’t know how you think about the Warriors.)

Of course, we’d love to find people who listened closely to all of their elementary school teachers’ sentence diagramming lessons and write pristine prose, but what we really want to see is passion, (tasteful) humor, and a sense of what it means to coherently organize and defend ideas. There are no right answers or expectations of needing to be optimistic or pessimistic about the team (you’ve probably noticed that our current staff runs the gamut in that regard), but creativity and style is certainly preferred.

3. Should you send a resume? Every year I do this, people send me resumes, which is generally a great practice for any job search. Yet, for this particular situation, I do agree with Aline Lerner’s point about resumes that, “Very smart people, who are otherwise fantastic writers, seem to check every ounce of intuition and personality at the door and churn out soulless documents.”

Yikes! That doesn’t sound too helpful when actually looking for writers!

If you really, really believe that sending a resume will do a better job of illustrating something you’ve said about yourself in Step 1 above, feel free to send it along (if you have a super-duper 21st century video resume, definitely send it — we’d love to see your creativity!). But you won’t be penalized for withholding a staler version of yourself — I’m obviously looking for more than that.

When we want to complete the process

The deadline to submit an application to volunteer with Golden State of Mind is 9 a.m. PST on Monday, August 6. I typically respond to everyone who applies by the deadline about my decision and/or next steps.

If you’ve come this far, thanks for considering this and I hope you apply! Even if you don’t want to become a formal contributor to GSoM at this, but do have thoughts you want to share, you’re always free to voice your opinions in a FanPost — there’s always plenty to discuss about the Warriors and we want to make this a space that encourages the free flow of ideas about the team.