Omar Ruiz turns his passion for sports into a winning career

Omar Ruiz (‘02) has always had a passion and talent for sports. After graduating high school, he played baseball at junior college. Ultimately, Ruiz realized that baseball would not be a viable profession for him and so he began to explore different career paths. Determined to stay immersed in the world of sports, Ruiz established a new dream: to become a sports broadcaster. 

“I remember thinking that would be so cool, to be able to go to the games and get paid for it,” recalled Ruiz.

Ruiz applied to a few different colleges and eventually chose SDSU, where he majored in journalism. After becoming an Aztec, Ruiz quickly began building his resume by covering SDSU sports. 

“Once I figured out okay this is what I want to do, I hit the ground running once. I got to SDSU and felt like okay, I’m going to do x, y and z and I'm going to make it happen,” said Ruiz.

Ruiz found many opportunities to get his foot in the door in the sports industry. An experience that stood out to him while at SDSU was with the student-run radio station KCR, for which he got to have his own sports segment.

“My second year at SDSU, I started working at KCR and eventually I carved out a 10 minute sports segment within the news program. That eventually became a half hour weekly sports show,” said Ruiz. 

Something that stuck with Ruiz while at SDSU was the journalism program’s focus on ethics as well as grammar principles. These laid the foundation for Ruiz to eventually secure a sports reporter position with the NFL Network. This was a dream of his and has allowed him to cover events such as the Superbowl for the last 13 years. 

“I think that at the heart of what I do is I try to tell stories. I try to present my journalism in a way that it cannot be on the ticker, there has to be a more human element to it. I feel like I'm harder to replace that way,” said Ruiz. 

Looking to the future, Ruiz plans to continue covering sports, especially football. However, a dream of his is to cover the Olympics, possibly in 2028 when they are in Los Angeles.

“To get to experience what the Olympics mean to people, the joining of the world and putting differences aside, I always felt it would be special to be part of the Olympics,” said Ruiz.