Everything you need to understand about Daniel Martin ’27 — why he’s at Guilford College, what he’s chasing, the slightly obsessive glint that crosses his face whenever the Carolina Panthers break his heart again — begins with a small, dim dorm-room studio on the second floor of Bryan Hall.

It’s nothing elaborate. A dorm bed that serves as a desk. A wireless mic still fresh from its packaging. A webcam angled just so. And Daniel — a sophomore Sport Management major, first-gen student, former high school defensive end — leaning into the glow of his laptop, trying to turn the thing he’s always done for fun into something that might carry him somewhere.

Daniel and his high school friend Michael Fallin have talked sports for years. They’ve known each other since South Stokes High in King, N.C., first as football teammates, later as the kind of friends who mainly communicate in game stats and frustrated GIFs. For years they shared a common goal.

“We were always like, we should start a podcast,” Daniel says. “But, you know, life.”

Until August, when the Panthers season kicked off and something in Daniel finally said: enough waiting. Just start.

And that’s how Between the Lines, a weekly podcast about all things Carolina Panthers, came into being. Their episodes are about an hour long though Daniel admits without hesitation he could talk for hours about his favorite NFL team.

After the podcasts are recorded, Daniel handles TikTok, where they’re closing in on 100 followers, and Michael manages X/Twitter, posting live game reactions that Daniel jumps into when he can. Shorter episodes go to YouTube, where 20 subscribers feel less like a number and more like a tiny, loyal congregation. “We’re trying to get better,” he says. “Not just do podcasts but like, actual YouTube videos … 15, 20 minutes.”

There’s nothing slick about any of it. That’s the charm. It’s the opposite of manufactured: two friends running a homemade sports network from a dorm room and a house because they have opinions, energy and a season’s worth of pent-up takes.

“I think I actually like talking about the losses more,” Daniel says, grinning. “You can just … go. Rant. Break everything down. A win’s a win. But a loss? That’s where all the stories are.”

He’s been a sports kid forever — football and basketball first, baseball infiltrating his heart only a few years ago. His stepfather made him a Panthers fan when he was 5, and the loyalty stuck.

Maybe that’s why he talks about broadcasters with a kind of reverence, especially Joe Davis, the play-by-play voice for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Fox Sports. “He has such a presence,” Daniel says, the way someone else might gush about a musician’s tone. “I watch him and think, okay, how do I do that?”

He hasn’t taken any formal broadcasting steps — no warm-ups, no drills. “I just let it fly,” he says. But he listens to himself. He studies what works. He tweaks small things. He sounds like someone already in an unofficial apprenticeship.

He’s started doing live play-by-play when he can — two Panthers games, one Guilford women’s soccer match — building a reel one broadcast at a time. The work is slow, unglamorous and occasionally frustrating. But he talks about it the way people talk about craft: the audio and video software he’s teaching himself, the thumbnails he’s designing, the flash he wants to add to YouTube intros once he learns how.

“It’s kind of generic right now,” he says. “But it gets the job done. We want to make it better every week over the last week.”

Guilford didn’t necessarily spark the direction, he says. The desire was already there, going back to childhood, when he’d rewrite game recaps in a notebook just to get the story right. But taking a journalism class at Guilford and writing for The Guilfordian, the student newspaper, sharpened him — taught him how to explain sports clearly, gather information and sound authoritative without trying too hard.

That’s his goal:  to become more polished, to build a resume that might one day earn him his big break. That he does this while talking about his favorite football team only makes it all the more fun.

“Go Panthers,” he says, grinning — the way someone does when they know the story isn’t finished yet.