Dana O’Neil covers college basketball for ESPN.com. (Quite well, for those of you unfamiliar with her work.) So to help us get a sense of what it’s like working for the World Wide Leader, a national perspective on the current state of the IU program and the Big Ten as well as a few other interesting topics, Dana generously agreed to answer a few questions for Inside the Hall. You can follow her on Twitter here. The transcript of our e-mail Q & A is below:

You made the move to ESPN.com a little over two years ago after writing at The Bucks County Courier Times and The Philadelphia Daily News. What was the transition like moving from a newspaper to one of the most widely read Internet sports properties in the world?

For me, the hardest thing about moving from Philly to ESPN was getting my arms around the scope of this new job. It was a little daunting at first. There’s a comfort in familiarity. I knew Philly, Villanova, the Big 5 and the Big East so well that I could automatically put stories and situations into context. I knew the history of the programs and most of the players for four years. I knew Jay Wright since he started at Villanova. Even more, I knew the people and best of all, they knew me.

When I jumped to ESPN all of college basketball was my beat. Major gulp. I’m a college basketball fan, so I always knew what was going on in the national scene and knew the major players, or at least about them, but they didn’t necessarily know me. It was a little overwhelming to fly in to a city, watch a game, introduce myself and bam, come up with a column or a 2,000-word feature.

Like anything else, the solution was simple: do your homework and work hard. I went to the AAU tourneys in Vegas, not to watch recruits but to catch up with coaches while they were relaxed and introduce myself. Every time I went to a game if the opportunity presented, I introduced myself to the players I was interviewing. I read everything before I did a feature so I knew what I was writing about and so the person I was speaking to respected the effort.

I’m not great at this gig yet. Far from it. But I feel like I have my arms around it finally.

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