Ten years have gone by and he is back home working for KTLA, Channel 5.At one time a dream and now a reality, Damon Andrews, Cerritos College graduate, grew up in the city of Cerritos and is now living out his dream as a sports director and anchor for KTLA. “Sportscasting is all I ever wanted to do. On the aptitude test in fifth grade I fell into the category of communications and sports,” Andrews said. “It’s pretty amazing in the respect that this is what I wanted to do. It doesn’t surprise me at all,” he added.He went to Cerritos High School from 1981 to 1985 where he played football. After graduating from high school, he attended Cerritos College where he received an Associate of Arts in General Studies in 1987.After receiving his AA, he attended Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington and received a Bachelors of Arts in Television Production and Performance. He met is wife Shelcy there and has been married for 14 years.The good ol’ daysAndrews grew up at a time when the city of Cerritos was not quite developed.”I grew up across the street from Regional Park; I remember when Cerritos had cow pastures, the smell was pretty bad,” Andrews said. Andrews used to play basketball and baseball at the park with his friends. His siblings all attended Cerritos College and played basketball.All his friends were in sports and played in various city leagues; he played in tournament basketball. “We had a good time and won so many trophies, my dad has them all,” he said.He was a Senator in the Associated Students of Cerritos College because they wanted some athletes on the senate, so he joined. The basketball team at Cerritos was No. 1 in the state.”It helped shape my likes and dislikes, and that is who I am today,” he said. While in Washington State, he interned at an ABC affiliate, KXLY in Spokane, in 1991 for four months. He learned to shoot his own film, write copy and edit for television. “It was a valuable experience for me. It was very professional and actually pretty big for Washington at the time,” Andrews said.Andrews was a news apprentice with no real job description. He basically did whatever he was asked to do. For example, Bureau runs, checks on equipment, pick up the general manager’s wife and take her to a movie premiere to meet her husband. Also, take reporters out to do live shots.”It was not very technical, it just makes me have a better appreciation, things take time,” he said.Coming home to Southern CaliforniaBefore joining the KTLA news team he worked in Chicago where he was national sports anchor for Fox Sports Chicago, Fox Sports Bay Area and Fox Sports Ohio. He wrote and anchored three shows a day and hosted pre and post-game shows for the Cubs, White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks. Andrews was hired last August at KTLA and is the sports director and anchor for KTLA’s weeknight “News at Ten.” He works with producers and interns to produce the content for the broadcast.He says he is the gatekeeper for the content, he leads the sports department in a professional way and tries to formulate what type of broadcast they want to have. Andrews said, “It’s hard in a local news cast to gloss over things with the time constraints, and to give people additional angles all in a short period of time.”His style is simple. If he’s entertaining and fun while giving information, people will watch.They look for the human side of things when they pick their stories.”We like to have fun. I like to have fun and we like to show that in our broadcast. Sports people like to take a sigh; hard news on a fire is very serious. Sports should be lighter,” Andrews said.Transitioning from one place to anotherAndrews says that there are differences in how to deliver sports in each city he has been to. Every place has a different type of sport they want to see on TV.”Picking up and moving had to be the hardest thing. It has been a difficult journey in television,” Andrews said.”I was in Memphis, Tennessee for three years and I had to learn what type of sports were important to them.”When he was in Baltimore, Maryland, he had to gear his sports broadcast more toward the ladies in the area. He has also had to take stories about anything and make them compelling. Then, in Chicago, it was all professional sports coverage; if you didn’t know your sports stats then people didn’t pay attention. Andrews says it’s been a challenge. In L.A., everything is superficial, but the audience always wants to know something that is going on. He says in order to be successful in the business, you have to make it important to people. You need to find out what people care about in the city, and if it’s important to them, than you do a story on it. Like in Chicago, people live and die with teams and will get physically ill if the teams they love lose a game.But then in L.A., you get some hardcore Dodgers, Angels and Lakers fans, and have people jump on the bandwagon when the teams are doing well in their season. Preparation for the “News at Ten”Andrews prepares the stories he feels are most important to tell the audience and then tries to also find other unique stories to tell. Anchors sometimes only have 30-40 seconds to tell the story. The writers must write copy for the show with time constraints in mind so that the show runs on schedule.The night of the show can either go as planned or be replaced with a car chase that always seems to steal the show.”It’s a car chase, it never happens in L.A., it’s just so unique,” he joked.”Sports is one of the last segments in the broadcast and that means if there is a car chase I don’t get a spot on the show,” Andrews said.He says that it’s the nature of the market, “People have a morbid way of thinking and there are always hopes that the car is going to crash.”This Saturday, Andrews and his team will be awarded for Best Sports Segment, “Sports with Damon Andrews,” by the Associated Press Television-Radio Association of California and Nevada. “I think its pretty cool. I won an Emmy in Memphis in 1998 for sportscasting for a show,” he said.”I don’t do it for awards I just do it. “It’s in my blood,” he added.”I still get nervous, its actually more anxiety than nervousness.”