Mary “Patti” Arnold decided in the ninth grade that she wanted to be a sports reporter — she said so in 1981 to the Olathe News in Olathe, Kansas, as a 22-year-old intern.

With her eyes on landing a job as a sports reporter for a daily newspaper, she told the Olathe News: “Supposedly, there is a market for sports writers out there somewhere, so all I have to do is find it.”

She found it, alright.

Patti (it would be sacrilegious to refer to her as Arnold, which journalistic style often dictates) spent nearly 38 years giving big-city coverage to athletes of all ages in the small communities along Colorado’s Western Slope as a sports reporter for the Daily Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction. Patti died last weekend of natural causes at 67 years old.

Patti joined the Daily Sentinel in September 1985. In those early years, she covered mostly prep and community sports for the largest paper between Denver and Salt Lake City. By Memorial Day weekend, she and the rest of the Sentinel’s sports desk covered the Division I junior college baseball world series, or simply JUCO. She worked her way up to covering then-Mesa State College, now Division II Colorado Mesa University, where she essentially became the authority on the school’s athletics and a maverick for anything Mavericks-related. Services are still pending, but she will be laid to rest next to her parents in Brookfield, Missouri, Colorado Mesa University said.

“Patti had the amazing ability to bring a human story to every student-athlete. You could be 4-for-4, could be 0-for-4, she humanized that story that made every sibling, parent and friend of those families say, ‘I know that student-athlete!’,” said Jamie Hamilton, the former chairman of the JUCO Committee, former interim athletics director at then-Mesa State, and an Arvada West High School graduate. “Patti took that to the next level.”

Patti’s prose and ability to capture athletes’ stories nabbed her numerous journalism awards. While Grand Junction-area athletes often fly under the Front Range’s radar, the silver lining was that they were treated as any big-name athlete with Patti’s attention to detail and ability to weave a story.

And she did that for three decades. She covered fathers and mothers, then covered their sons and daughters. Generations of area athletes grew up knowing that Patti would tell their story. That’s a community sports reporter’s dream.

Joe Ramunno, head football coach at Palisade High School, became well-acquainted with Patti over the years. He began coaching Palisade not long after Patti came to the area, and she covered some lowly Bulldog teams. That made it all the sweeter when Ramunno forged a Palisade powerhouse that won multiple state titles in the 1990s. She covered Ramunno when he took over the Mesa State football team from 1998-2011.

“She got it. She loved her pets, and we had a common bond there. She knew how to lighten things up, take pressure off and get you to relax,” Ramunno said, later adding that he was “very appreciative for everything she did for me in my career, what she represented and what she was all about.”

Patti’s dedication to her craft made the Western Slope’s athletes feel as if they were the stars. She treated area football games the same way she would treat a CU Buffs game. Well, to be more accurate, how she would treat a Kansas Jayhawks, Kansas City Royals, or a Kansas City Chiefs game.

That was evident to Mike Krueger, director of the Colorado High School Activities Association.

Krueger got to know Patti well. He was an assistant basketball coach at Grand Junction. He then coached multiple sports, including basketball, at Palisade and eventually became the school’s athletics director.

“She always made kids feel like they were a big deal and, to her, they were,” Krueger said, later adding: “It was either the Durango-Cortez trip or the Moffat County-Steamboat trip when I was coaching boys basketball. I would always be calling in late on a Friday night after we played one and then the next day we’d play the other. I remember she would pick up the phone and she always said, ‘Coach Krueger, how the heck did it go up there?’ and we would just sit and I would just laugh, and we would just have a great time talking about the game. It wasn’t just calling in to report the scores; she would end up writing a story the next day on how things went. And sometimes those were great and fun conversations, and other times it was, ‘Oh, man. We didn’t play well, Patti.’

“She always had a comforting ear,” Krueger continued.

That approach had an impact on the players as well.

“It was fantastic growing up here with the coverage at the Daily Sentinel gave all the teams, and I always felt we were much more blessed on this side of the mountain with prep coverage than the eastern side,” said Mary Doane, the head girls basketball coach at Grand Junction High School who previously coached high school ball at Grand Junction Central and Durango, and college ball at Mesa State, and who went to Palisade High School.

Doane later said, “(Patti) was a reporter who was all in.”

Patti’s true forte was JUCO and Colorado Mesa. In case you’re unfamiliar with the former, the JUCO World Series is the DI junior college version of the College World Series in Omaha. Thousands pack Suplizio Field in this small city tucked beneath the Rocky Mountains to watch 10 of the best JUCO baseball teams in the country duke it out in a double-elimination tournament for the national championship. Bryce Harper, Kirby Puckett and Jacob Misiorowski all played there — and Patti covered them.

Patti also worked as the media liaison for the tournament, which included running stats, getting stories on the website jucogj.org and processing credential requests. She had to process hundreds of requests when Harper came to JUCO with Southern Nevada College in 2010, just months before the Washington Nationals took him No. 1 overall.

She also brought everyone in the press box to their knees with her delectable brownies.

“It’s fascinating to me how many people she’s touched because she reported on the (positives) of being in athletics,” Hamilton said, later adding: “The only other thing I can say from my heart was that I loved her. That’s all I can say.”

Just as Patti was JUCO (she literally wrote the book on the tournament), she was Colorado Mesa sports. She chronicled each of the school’s varsity sports to the best of her ability, but she especially hit her stride covering Colorado Mesa’s baseball program, the winningest in DII in the 2010s. After retirement, she worked part-time with the university’s athletics communications.

Patti’s impact reached beyond sports and to the people who covered them.

She trained dozens of reporters throughout the years and grew closer to you if she knew you cared for the job as much as she did.

Jon Mitchell, now the lead editor and content manager for the Colorado Springs Gazette, worked with Patti at the Sentinel in two separate stints.

“(S)he never stopped teaching me — or sticking up for me when needed,” Mitchell posted on X.

Katie Langford, now a breaking news reporter for The Denver Post, also worked alongside Patti at the Sentinel.

“Patti was one of the first people I met at (the Sentinel) and was a steady, kind presence in the newsroom as well as a passionate, deeply-sourced journalist,” Langford posted on X.

This reporter began working side-by-side with her at the Daily Sentinel in 2021. I found my stride when I moved to the sports desk to cover Western Slope high schools, thanks in large part to observing Patti’s preparation for interviews, attention to detail and passion for sports journalism.

She gave me career advice and thoroughly edited my job applications, which helped me land my current job at the Daily Camera in Boulder. I only knew Patti at the end of her career and she still helped me, maybe more than she knew. She was hard on me when she needed to be, and that made the times she praised me all the more gratifying.

Do yourself a favor: Get a free trial to newspapers.com and search “Patti Arnold” in Grand Junction papers from 1985-2023. There’s your nightly reading. You’ll read stories of successes such as Kelsey Ford, then the No.1 singles player for the Grand Junction girls tennis team, playing in the 1991 Class 6A finals in Pueblo on a broken foot. You’ll read stories of heartbreak, such as when the Grand Junction girls basketball team fell to Ponderosa in the Class 3A title game in 1988.

Patti was a pillar of the Western Slope sports and journalism communities, and she was one of the best sportswriters whom many people in the state probably never read.

There will be other sportswriters who make an impact in their Colorado communities and move mountains — but there will never be another Patti Arnold.