University of New Hampshire Athletics
Women's Basketball
- Title:
- Staff Writer / UNHWildcats.com (Women's Basketball)
- Email:
- allen.lessels@unh.edu
- Phone:
- 603-731-3768
Allen Lessels joined the athletic communications team as its first-ever in-house staff writer in August 2014. He provides daily fresh content for UNHWildcats.com via his UNH Insider blog and @UNHInsider Twitter account. The veteran sportswriter also writes feature stories on past and present student-athletes and works on special projects.
Lessels returned to his alma mater after covering Wildcats athletics for more than 20 years. He previously covered UNH as his primary beat for the New Hampshire Union Leader from the summer of 2002-14. Prior to that, he covered UNH and other colleges in the region for 13 years for the Boston Globe and its New Hampshire Weekly section. He has covered numerous NCAA Frozen Four hockey tournaments, each of the NCAA Regionals hosted by UNH at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester and has not missed a game played by the Wildcat football team during its 10-year playoff run in the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) tournament. The Concord, N.H., native covered his first Wildcat athletics events in the 1970s while studying journalism at the school, and he has taught classes in sportswriting at the University.
Lessels has been named the New Hampshire Sportswriter of the Year 11 times –including 2012 and 2013- by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association (NSSA). He received the Hockey East Association’s Joe Concannon Media Award (2007) for demonstrating a superior body of work in covering and promoting the league over an extended period.
During his Boston Globe career, Lessels also covered NASCAR racing, the U.S. Open tennis tournament and all the professional teams in Boston. He has worked as an editor and writer for the Hartford Courant, Portland Press Herald and Concord Monitor as well as other papers in the region. He has contributed as a freelance writer to a wide range of publications, including the New England Hockey Journal, New England Ski Journal, ESPN Boston and the UNH Magazine. He has done work as an analyst on radio and also was host of “Ski New Hampshire” on WKXL in Concord.
Lessels wrote “Live Free, Drive Fast: Behind the Scenes at the New Hampshire International Speedway,” a book that chronicles the 2005 season at the racetrack. He was the co-author of “Black Bears Baseball: Orono to Omaha,” a story about the University of Maine’s vaunted baseball program. Lessels also wrote the chapter on recreation and athletics for “Crosscurrents of Change: Concord, N.H. in the 20th Century,” a history published in 2011 by the Concord Historical Society.
