“It’s very difficult, I’m not going to lie … Setting time aside for little things, and I would say planning myself out, is really important. I use my calendar a lot,” she said with a laugh.
Cox originally hails from Boston, where she grew up before moving to Vermont at age 10. Like much of her life, she had things planned out when picking a college.
“I’ve always wanted to move back to Boston and settle down and raise my kids there, because I love it there so much, but I thought college would be the best opportunity to go to a different city and explore,” she said. “Growing up, we always visited New York, and I loved it so much, and I decided I really wanted to come here, so I applied to a few different schools, but Fordham really stood out to me on all levels: academics-wise, the fact that there are sports, which you can’t really find in New York. As soon as I found out I got in, I basically knew I was coming here.”
Thus far, during her time at Fordham Cox has dabbled in many sectors of the sports landscape and sports media. Her biggest time commitment is being a student-athlete for Fordham Cheer, which she joined before arriving at Rose Hill her first year. Cox can be found cheering on the sidelines with her fellow cheerleaders for Fordham’s football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball games. The decision to try out for Fordham Cheer came after years spent in the gym as a competitive gymnast.
“I was a competitive gymnast my entire life … When I was 10, we moved to Vermont, and I started at the Regal Gymnastics Academy, which was about a 50-minute drive from my house. I was doing that four to five times a week, four-hour practices, so absolutely a lot from the age of 10 to when I was 17 and stopped doing gymnastics,” she said. “My original plan was to hopefully get recruited for college gymnastics and do gymnastics in college. With Covid, that didn’t really work out. I was out of the gym for almost a year, and my plans changed pretty significantly … Something that stood out to me for cheer was also getting to watch all the games. As a huge fan of football and basketball, I was like, this gives me another opportunity to sit on the court or to stand on the field and watch the games happen even closer than anybody else would,” Cox said.
When not cheering, Cox can be found at a Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) meeting, where she advocates for fellow student-athletes. SAAC serves as a bridge between Fordham’s administration and the student-athlete body, and it’s involved in many community initiatives as well as support for student-athletes, including a Rams Supporting Rams initiative to get student-athletes to go to other teams’ events. She has also been working for Fordham Athletics marketing in an effort to bring more attention to Fordham Athletics on social media.
“It’s just a lot of communication stuff between the people doing the socials for certain teams and me, and then also our student athletes, and kind of figuring out what they want out of their socials,” she said.“I had an internship with [Fordham Athletics’ marketing department] over the summer, and the main idea was that we had to create a project we wanted to either be part of or accomplish this year, or hand off to others to accomplish … My project was this interview series called Ramble On, where we interview student athletes about their lives outside of sports … I’ve kind of been spearheading it, and we’re trying to get more people involved to do the interviews, but so far, I’ve done all of them. It’s been great to hear stories from athletes and meet people, meet other athletes that I’ve never spoken to before,” Cox said.
After Fordham, Cox wants to go into sports media, a field she credits WFUV for helping her prepare for. Cox is a staff member at WFUV Sports, having joined as a trainee in her sophomore year, and she’s gotten the chance to be on the mic for podcasts and talk shows and report for the National Women’s Soccer League’s Gotham Football Club.
It is honestly the best experience I could have ever asked for to kind of set me up for a career in sports media. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. FUV has really propelled me and given me practical experience where I feel like I’m not going to go into the work world with no idea of what I’m doing,” she said. “I have this dilemma every day of, do I want to go into the sports business and manage teams and such? Or do I want to go into sports broadcasting and do sideline reporting, writing, and such? … We’re going to have to see where that goes.”
Cox’s devotion to sports has become integral to her life at Fordham, and it’s something she hopes to continue throughout the rest of her life, long after her last game cheering, her last marketing project, or her last time behind the FUV mics.
