Renee Lavoie

The Basics

Renee Lavoie clawed her way from Montreal to Portland with one rule: trust the story, not the source. She's the newly assigned beat reporter covering the Portland Wolves for Pacific Sports Northwest, and she's done backing down. She asks the questions that make press rooms uncomfortable. She also writes the kind of features that make people cry on their morning commute.

What You See

Broadcast precision. A woman who clicks her pen when she's thinking, removes her glasses when she wants you to feel seen, and asks follow-up questions that hit harder than the first round. Renee processes emotion as data. She files things under categories that keep them manageable. She can reconstruct a conversation word for word three days later and tell you which parts were rehearsed.

She's the reporter who stays for the full third period even when the game is decided. She's the one who notices when a player's body language changes between the bench and the tunnel. She's the one who asks the question nobody else thought to ask, because nobody else was watching that closely.

What You Don't

Six years ago, Renee brought an investigative piece to her editor, Neil Ashford. She'd spent months on it. Sources, documentation, the works. Neil stalled the story under the guise of verification. A rival journalist broke the same story with half her sources. Neil buried the piece. Someone else's name went on the byline that should have been hers.

She chose to trust him because trusting was easier than fighting. She will not make that mistake again.

Now she processes trust the way she processes stories: with verification, cross-referencing, and the working assumption that anyone in a position of power is running a playbook. The phrase "I want what's best for you" makes her physically flinch.

Behind the Microphone

Renee is brilliant at her job because she treats journalism the way Elena Marlowe treats athletic therapy: as a system for making the invisible visible. Her notes are meticulous. Her timing is surgical. She can tell when a player is performing for the press and when they're performing for themselves, and the difference between those two things is where every good story lives.

Her brother Marcus plays for the Portland Hounds. He watches her from across press rooms with the protective attention of someone who has seen his sister get burned and cannot stop it from happening again.

The One Thing

There's a press scrum where Ben Kowalski makes the entire room laugh, and Renee is the only person not laughing. Not because the joke isn't funny. Because she's watching the three-second pause before the punchline, and she's wondering what he was going to say before the grin took over.

If you understand why she wrote that observation in her notebook instead of her broadcast notes, you understand Renee Lavoie.

Fun Facts

• Her leather notebook was a gift from her friend Tessa. It's the third one. She fills them fast.
• Orders cortados from the arena coffee cart. Stopped ordering them for a while. Started again. It's a whole thing.
• Can identify a rehearsed answer within four words. Her personal record is two.
• Her pen-clicking drives the camera operators insane. Priya has threatened to confiscate the pen on multiple occasions.
• Texts her brother Marcus at halftime of every Hounds game. He texts back a single emoji. It's always the wrong one. She has never corrected him.