We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ava Kitzi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ava, appreciate you joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your professional career?

I started working for a news outlet – The Morning Chalk Up – when I was 16. I worked there until a few days after my 20th birthday in November, and leaving was such a big move for me. Of course, basically everything I know about journalism (despite being in school for it) is from the hands-on, thrown-in-the-deep-end work I did within the CrossFit industry. I was shooting events with deliverables not knowing how to adjust my exposure. I’m so grateful that this is how I learned.

However, the most important thing I learned from my time at MCU was the value of myself and my work. Like many places in the photography industry, especially in sports and <especially> in CrossFit, there are always people who will ask you to work for “experience.” Meaning without pay. This might have been okay (though morally, I would argue that it still isn’t) when I was 16 and just messing around with articles and photos. When I was 19, working as a lead photographer and staff writer, leading teams, moving our content forward in new ways, and going well beyond what was asked of me, me having to fight for my international flights and hotels for where I was working on assignment and for fair wages was not okay. It was extremely frustrating to be undervalued financially and emotionally. It took me a long time to know my worth, but I finally got there!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I fell into journalism as a childish endeavor to be as much like Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls as possible. I had always loved to write but in seventh grade, I was sure that I was a failure that I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do with my life. This felt like the obvious solution. Combining writing, pleated skirts, and fast talking. Rory seemed like she had it figured out.

I had some elementary endeavors in the world of journalism – starting my middle school’s paper, quickly rising the ranks of my first high school’s paper before COVID struck and I switched to a private school where I not only started the paper but taught the principles of journalism and media literacy to middle schoolers. But where my love and work in the journalism industry really started was at a CrossFit news source called Morning Chalk Up. Having grown up in the fitness world and as a competitive CrossFitter, at 16 I emailed the editors with an attached op-ed about why people should care about CrossFit teens. My solution to the otherwise complain-y piece was to cover them more. Pay attention to the teens! The editors were eager to publish the piece and let me do more work for them. (For free, of course, but that’s something to talk about later).

I spent nearly two years, since all of this was in the midst of COVID, covering stories of both the community and the elite athletes in the CrossFit world via written stories. At the 2022 CrossFit Games (basically the Olympics of the sport, held every year in Madison Wisconsin), I was “hired” (again, still for free) to cover the teen competition. Though I was supposed to be writing, there’s not a whole lot of interviews you can capture while the events are going on. So I pulled out my camera, took pictures of the athletes who also happened to be some of my best friends, and played around. Quickly, I realized this was way, way more fun for me. I continued double-timing my work, capturing stories through both written and visual work. I gained recognition for both and was finally able to make money for it all.

As I became more confident and interested in photography, I took every chance I got to try things out. As one of ten in my graduating class, I got to shoot pretty much everything for my high school and found my footing with other sports. When I decided on Mizzou – the SEC school and major journalism institution that happens to be in my hometown – I knew I wanted to shoot college sports. This also became a huge part of my identity and I’ve learned so much through it.

My town has a huge oversaturation of photographers. As one of the top journalism schools in the country, there are so many amateur photographers with a DSLR hoping to bring in some extra cash by doing some senior portraits. It’s really hard to find something to differentiate myself against everyone else.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Being kind! Sports photography is stressful, no matter what level or sport. It’s frustrating and chaotic and there’s always too much noise and too many people and in a lot of cases, it’s all just a matter of chance. What I’ve learned is to practice grace and kindness with other photographers, athletes, and anyone else you come across. It’s never so serious that you can’t squeeze just a little more for someone else to sit next to you in a press pit or that you can’t have a chat between plays about the weather.

At the same time, though, I think it’s really important to not let people walk all over you. As a really small, young, blonde hair girl, I think this heavily male-dominated field finds it easy to to push me aside and not take me seriously. Which is frustrating beyond belief and sometimes disheartening. I’ve learned to hold my place and make myself a space in this industry in my own ways, though.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

At my first CrossFit Games, I interviewed a lot of less famous athletes to get more of the human interest side of the competition. One of these athletes was then 44-year-old Nuno Costa, a single, gay father to a two-year-old girl who was also a recovering alcoholic and a CrossFit Games athlete. His story was super inspiring. One of resilience, finding himself, and being a good role model for the community at his gym. What his story was not about, not at all, was his sexuality. Besides him being a single father who adopted his daughter, it literally had nothing to do with who he liked. I spent a lot fo time and thought a lot about how to do his story justice and was really proud of how it turned out.

When it was published, though, my editors had changed it completely. The headline read something like “Gay 44-Year-Old Places Fourth at CrossFit Games” (that’s probably exaggerated because this is something of a bad memory for me). I was back home from my traveling at this point, and as a 17-year-old, I was at my parents’ house. I was so beside myself, sobbing and trying to figure out how to make this right. I really felt, and still feel, that Nuno’s story wasn’t told correctly. I understand why they did it, of course. It was a better, more interesting headline. But clicks aren’t a responsible way to conduct journalism.

I could’ve easily just let it all happen, cowered and not brought it up to my editors. But I personally reached out to Nuno, chatted with him about the article, and then brought it up with my editors about how I felt like they unfairly portrayed the subject. It would’ve been easy to let this adjust my sights and views on journalism because of that, but I doubled down and I feel like it’s solidified my goal of telling raw, humanity-focused stories of athletes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://avakitziphotography.mypixieset.com/
• Instagram: @avakitzi
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ava-kitzi-60b9291a8/