Baldwin native Yaw Bonsu provides Super Bowl coverage insights

As he was gearing up to fly to Las Vegas to cover the Super Bowl for Hofstra University’s radio station, WRHU-FM, Yaw Bonsu, 21, of Baldwin, recalled, work needed to be done, and that meant controlling his emotions.

“There’s a job to do,” he said last week as he looked back on the experience. “Leading up to it, I wasn’t as excited as other people because, you know, at the end of the day, there’s a job to do.”

Bonsu, a 21-year-old senior journalism major with a concentration in sports media at Hofstra’s Lawrence Herbert School of Communications, is active at WRHU, and directed the station in 2023.

His interest in journalism goes back to his days at Baldwin High School, when he interned at the Herald as a high school senior in the spring of 2020.

But it was his love for sports that attracted him to sports journalism, having sports journalist such as Ernie Johnson, Jen Lada and Stephen A. Smith to thank for, to name a few.

Touching down in Las Vegas on Feb. 4, a week before the game, Bonsu and Michelle Rabinovich, a Hofstra junior who is WRHU’s lead sports editor, learned they would have a spot on radio row at the entrance to the Super Bowl Media Center at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, where media from around the world converged.

But as the two walked through the doors at Allegiant Stadium for the event’s Opening Night on Feb. 5, Bonsu said that all the preparation they had gone through “went out the window.”

“We all had all these interviews going on … around us,” he recounted. “I didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

Based on information the NFL had sent to the media on who would be there, Bonsu had prepared a list of players — and fellow journalists — he wanted to interview, and had reached out to the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers about the possibility of interviewing them.

But when he saw that the players were accessible and walking around freely, he quickly adjusted.

“I had my camera, tripod and equipment ready on hand,” Bonsu said. “I did an interview with Jerick McKinnon of the Chiefs. Then I got another player, then two offensive linemen, and that’s when things started getting crazy.

“It was like (McKinnon) and everyone was expecting people like us to come up and talk with them,” Bonsu added.

As he began to understand the flow of the event, the following day, Tuesday, would be the same, with the only difference that he would be interviewing media personalities who cover the NFL.

From NFL officials to former players like J.J. Watt, Bonsu shared the opinions of the experts covering the big game with his WRHU listeners.

“I can confidently say that 95 percent of them were not planned,” he said of his interviews. “We ended up getting upwards of 20 interviews — (Fox Sports Radio host) Rob Parker, Michael Holley from NBC Sports, a sports anchor from Kansas City — it was crazy.”

In 2022, when Bonsu was a student at Syracuse University before transferring to Hofstra, he applied to the NFL to cover the Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals virtually — but he passed up that chance and applied two years later.

Bonsu and Rabinovich were the first Hofstra students in the history of the communications program to cover the event on-site. Although they didn’t stay to cover the game, Bonsu said he was optimistic that current and future students in the program will have the chance to do even more at Super Bowls to come.

“It’s one of the moments where it’s like, ‘Wow, you know, we really got to do this,’” he said. “While we’re still students, it meant that much more just to have that faith and trust in ourselves.”