As a School of Communication alumnus, Horstman has gone on to work in several national sports organizations and is now a reporter covering the Minnesota Lynx
Terry Horstman
By Taylor Pedersen, CLA Student Writer - May 15, 2026
Long before he was in press boxes and pursuing book deals, Terry Horstman, ‘11, was in his driveway, shooting baskets. The way he described his days as a child was playing basketball until dark, getting called inside, and then retreating upstairs, not to do homework, but to write.
“I would just write about basketball,” Horstman said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I love writing, I’m a writer now.’ It was just a way to spend more time with the game.”
Horstman grew up in Minneapolis, fully invested in the highs and lows of Minnesota sports, dreaming of going pro. By high school, he let go of this dream and realized that writing didn’t take him away from sports, but rather deepened his connection to them.
“It really became this tool to do anything,” he said. “It opened up other worlds.”
His path to Oregon State University was, by his own admission, accidental.
“I don’t really know how I ended up there,” he said, laughing. “But I loved it from the moment I arrived.”
He arrived undeclared, then eventually ended up in the then-emerging new media communications (NMC) program, now called digital communication arts. He described it as a “startup major” in the late 2000s. Platforms like YouTube and Twitter were just beginning to change how stories were told and consumed, and Horstman was right at the start of it.
“There was so much optimism,” he said. “We were studying these things as they were being rolled out. You almost felt a part of it.”
The program offered a diverse catalog of courses in animation, A/V production, 3D modeling, media theory, entrepreneurship, and more, many of which were taught by Horstman’s favorite faculty members, including the late-Bill Lodges, as well as former professors Ron Seymour and Pam Cytrynbaum.
But Horstman kept circling back to writing.
“If you want to be a writer,” he said, “you pretty much already are.”
He tested that philosophy at The Daily Barometer, where Horstman became a reliable reporter covering Oregon State basketball.
“I walked in, and they were like, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘sports.’ And they said, ‘Great, go do it.’ Looking back, at any other university with a more traditional journalism program there would be students lining up and waiting for years to cover that beat.”
Horstman described the men’s basketball team at that time as “dreadful,” but that didn’t matter. It was a trial by fire: press conferences next to veteran reporters, stressful and unfamiliar deadlines, and early mistakes, including a misquote in his first story that he still remembers.
“I’ve never misquoted someone since,” he said.
More importantly, it gave him something harder to teach: confidence.
“You realize pretty quickly you have as much of a right to be there as anyone,” he said.
Horstman would go on to cover the basketball team’s 2009 championship run in the College Basketball Invitational (CBI) under first-year head coach Craig Robinson, beating the University of Texas at El Paso in a best of three series. He would also step in to help with covering other OSU athletic events, like men’s soccer and football, including the team's upset win against the No. 1 ranked University of Southern California in 2008. During the week, Horstman also co-hosted a weekly sports talk show on KBVR-FM with his sports editor at The Daily Barometer, Kye Johnson, ‘10.
After graduation, Horstman found himself bouncing between marketing and media relations internships and in several new cities like Portland, Chicago, and New York. He worked with the Portland Timbers in their inaugural MLS season, then the Trail Blazers, then U.S. Soccer, then Major League Soccer. The 2011 season Horstman interned with the Trail Blazers was especially hectic; the season began playing on Christmas Day because of an ongoing labor dispute known as a “lockout,” then, in the middle of the season, the Trail Blazers moved on from long-time prospect Greg Oden and ended up firing the head coach, Nate McMillan. A “masterclass of working in media relations,” Horstman put it.
“It made me pretty adaptable,” he said. “But it also helped me realize what I didn’t want.”
What he didn’t want, it turned out, was to be in public relations.
“I didn’t want to be the person putting the policies together,” he said. “I wanted to be the one telling the story. There was a point where being the guy granting media credential requests just didn’t seem like a good use of my NMC degree.”
That realization brought him back to Minneapolis and back to school. He decided to take the jump and commit fully to writing, by pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing at Hamline University in 2016, while also working simultaneously in the university’s administration. During that time, he co-founded a sports literary magazine called the Under Review with colleague Meghan Maloney-Vinz, while receiving valuable web-design guidance from former classmate JP Bertram, ‘11.
“The look and feel, as well as the content, was truly inspired by my time at OSU,” said Horstman. “While in NMC, I remember my peers were making movies and creating video games and, truthfully, I thought that there was nothing original that I could create. Launching a creative magazine with a sports slant was not something I thought about then, but it’s been so fulfilling to be the editor for the Under Review.”
Today, Horstman teaches creative writing in the Twin Cities and at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and covers the Minnesota Lynx, Minneapolis’ WNBA team, for the women’s sports publication The IX Sports. He’s also under contract with the University of Minnesota Press to write a book chronicling this season of Lynx basketball , inspired by many of the titles he read while falling in love with books years ago, but especially Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Halberstam’s 1981 book The Breaks of the Game about the Trail Blazers 1979 - 1980 season. For the Lynx, this season is going to be a special one; it’s the 30th anniversary of the WNBA, and the first under a new collective bargaining agreement, and the Lynx’s coach, Cheryl Reeve, is on the doorstep of breaking the all-time wins record.
The currently untitled Lynx book will be Horstman’s second book-length publication. His essay collection, This is Where the Fantasy Begins: an ode to Michael Jordan’s Playground was published in 2025 by Lion Bridge Publishing.
“I love sports because they’re a perfect container for stories,” he said. “They explain the human condition in a lot of ways.”
He’s less interested in wins and losses than in what surrounds them: the history of the Lynx organization, its ties to the Minneapolis community, and the evolution of women’s sports.
“There’s been a lot of progress,” he said. “And still a lot more to go.”
To Horstman, the worlds of teaching, journalism, and creative writing naturally overlap.
“Nothing makes you better at writing than having to explain it to a room full of students,” he said.
There’s a running joke among writers, he added: at some point, you realize you’ve assigned yourself homework for the rest of your life.
“It never goes away,” he said. “But if you love it, that’s the point.”
Alongside his reporting about Minneapolis sports, Horstman is still closely connected with OSU athletics. In 2021, Horstman started Belligerent Beavs, a podcast all about OSU athletics, with Bertram and another former classmate Benny Wehage, '11.
Ask Horstman how he defines success now, and the answer is not sales numbers, not awards, but instead, looking at something and knowing you gave it everything you had. In an industry increasingly driven by profit, for Horstman, the work still matters most: showing up to the page, day after day, with energy and intent.
“You can’t control who reads it,” he said. “You can only control how you write it.”
Back in that Minneapolis driveway, the goal was to keep playing for as long as possible. These days, the medium has changed, but the instinct and the passion remain the same.