Patrick Snell (1986 Leaver) – from Radio City to CNN

From Radio City to CNN

Just how the years have flown by! It seems but a moment ago that the Reverend Dennis Smith was taking our First Eleven cricket team to new heights. While there’s no doubt I developed admirably as a player under his astute guidance, it was quite clear that I was never going to make a living out of the game. The next best thing in my view was to embark on something that would get me as close to the field of play as the players themselves, if not quite out there at the crease!

I’m truly blessed to have enjoyed a wonderful Sports Media career spanning around two decades now and I most assuredly say that covering the recent ICC World Twenty20 tournament in the Caribbean was no hardship at all! Not that I got to see too much of Saint Lucia and Barbados of course but it was an occasion made extra special by an all too rare English achievement on the world stage and it was a real pleasure to be there to witness it first hand.

I’ve worked at CNN International for ten years now and have been based at the Network’s world headquarters in Atlanta for the last six, after spells earlier in my career in England with Liverpool’s Radio City and Granada Television.
One of the great things about my job is not just CNN’s ability to encompass the biggest names in sports, but also the fact the Network’s global reach is so huge it means we literally do have viewers in every corner of the world. Receiving emails from some of the more remote and far-flung reaches of the earth can certainly be very rewarding and with so much “new media” available to us now like Twitter and Facebook, the world truly can be a much smaller place. A lot of our viewers are always keen to get our thoughts and predictions on the hot topic of the day and those two powerful social media tools are a great way to enhance that communication.

When I’m not attending events, my time is spent writing and presenting our global sports news show “World Sport” which airs for half an hour several times a day. At the time of writing, I’m currently preparing to fly out to America’s West Coast to cover the United States Golf Open at the famed Pebble Beach course in California. That’s a venue I’ve always wanted to visit and there’s no doubt this is very much a case of career ambition being fulfilled!

Patrick Snell
(1981 – 1986)