On Monday, Feb. 10, Pizza with the Pros welcomed the Director of Social Media for Rush Order Tees and sports content creator, Jordyn Erard-Coupe.

Erard-Coupe graduated from Rowan University in 2020 with degrees in sports communication and media, radio/television/film production, and broadcast journalism. Outside of being a triple major at Rowan, she was a productions assistant, student sports reporter, national honors society member, and the inaugural recipient of the Rowan Excellence in Sports Communication and Media award her senior year.

On top of all of this, Erard-Coupe interned and worked during college as well, interning with 4th and Jawn as a Football Podcast Productions Intern, interning with NFL films as a Television Production Intern for Good Morning Football, and working as a server at Chickie’s and Pete’s for most of her college career.

However, Erard-Coupe’s life would take a turn in 2020, when the world entered a global pandemic. Everyone was stuck indoors and job opportunities were scarce. A lot of people, if put in her position, would have sat around and waited until the world went back to normal. 

Instead, Erard-Coupe started thinking outside the box for different ways she could still follow her dreams while facing this once-in-a-generation obstacle.

“I taught myself iMovie when I was in fifth grade when I got my first MacBook computer for Christmas,” Erard-Coupe said. “I was always the friend who was editing videos for everyone, we did stop motion and all the stuff that was kind of popular when social media and Facebook were just starting to blow up when I was growing up.”

Using her self-learned set of skills, all that she learned at Rowan, and her passion for sports, Erard-Coupe took this opportunity to launch and grow her own YouTube channel, titled SportyJordy, covering the latest NFL news and trends.

“Initially, I thought I had too many job offers,” Erard-Coupe said. “I was overwhelmed, I didn’t know what direction I was going to go, and then one by one they just started getting cold. So, confidence was low at that point just because I worked so hard, I did all these amazing things and there’s nowhere to go with it, so I took four months to process and decide if I just wanted to take a job or just do anything else outside of sports to get experience. I didn’t want too much time to go by without having something on my resume and then my heart was just like no, you dedicated everything to sports, this is what you want to do, so I started my YouTube channel.”

When COVID-19 settled down and people started to resume their regular lives, Erard-Coupe started to look for other opportunities, while continuing to produce, write, edit, and promote her channel. She found herself working as the Social Media Manager for UDDA for a year and worked the following year as the Marketing Communications Manager for Mojo, all leading to her current position as the Director of Social Media for Printfly Corporation.

While working all these other jobs, Erard-Coupes’ social media platforms continued to grow. Today, she has around 4,380 subscribers on YouTube, 38,400 followers on TikTok with 3.1 million total likes, and 40,900 followers on Instagram. SportyJordy has and will continue to grow, but having this much success with these platforms wasn’t the reason why she created a YouTube channel in the first place.

“Initially went into it with this is just going to be a resume builder,” Erard-Coupe said. “I can send it to everyone and it shows that I know sports and can talk about it. It shows that I’m comfortable on camera, it shows I have the producer qualities because I can run a full segment and I know what’s important, it shows I can edit, like all these different things. So basically I could be like whatever you need me to do I can do, but then I got very lucky and gained a following organically. It was very small at first, but just a lot of engagement from people I didn’t know being like you’re good at this, keep going, and I was like maybe there’s something here, and just followed along with that. It did what I wanted it to do, it got me jobs, but now I still get to be SportyJordy.”

Erard-Coupe was an inspiration for many students in the room who are looking to go into sports fields such as podcasts and content creation, while also showing students what it takes to be fully dedicated to your dreams, navigating through obstacles and letting nothing stop you from reaching them.

For comments/questions about this story DM us on Instagram @thewhitatrowan or email features@thewhitonline.com