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L aura Vecsey didn't exactly pick the ideal moment to launch her sports column for the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer .

"So far it has been depressing," says Vecsey, 32, who took over the column in late September amid the baseball and hockey strikes and with Seattle's professional teams "in turmoil." But, she adds, "it's getting interesting. I'm writing about anything and everything sports."

The daughter of New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey , Laura continues a long Vecsey tradition of sports journalism. "We call it the family illness," she says.

Laura, who wrote a sports column for the Albany Times-Union for two years before joining the Seattle paper last fall, traces the family journalism dynasty back to her grandparents, who worked for the Long Island Press .

Others stricken by the disease include Laura's uncle, Peter Vecsey , a basketball columnist for the New York Post and an NBC commentator, and her brother David , 25, a sportswriter with the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. Her sister, Corinna , 30, formerly of the Associated Press , recovered: She left the family business to become an attorney. Their mother, an abstract painter, immune to journalism's call, serves as the family's "support system."

Though sports journalism seems a perfect fit, Vecsey says it was not her career of choice when she was studying liberal arts at Sarah Lawrence College. "I really wanted to be a poet," she says. "I still do..but you don't make any money as a poet.

"I never really prepared for this," she adds. "I just got out of school and I needed a job." After covering news and sports for a small chain of papers in Long Island, her experience "apprenticing" under her father and being dragged to sporting events as a child eventually led to a job as lead sports columnist in Albany.

Vecsey says no one is more thrilled with her latest move than her father. "My dad is my biggest supporter," she says. "We talk, we share ideas, we go to events together – it's great."