By BILL ANDREWS

When Mario Aguirre failed to make his high school basketball team for the third time, he knew it might be time for something else. He took his English teacher’s advice and signed up for Journalism 101 at East Los Angeles College, figuring he could write about sports.

“If I’d made it” to the team, he said, “I might not have done this.”

After a while, his colleagues started to tease him because he wrote only about sports, so again he decided to branch out. Since then, Aguirre, 23, from the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles, has written about race relations, politics, summer camps and senior Olympics for a variety of news organizations. Even if he had made the team, he said, “I’d rather have found this than ride a year on the bench.”

“In the end it’s all journalism,” he said, shrugging off his versatility in writing about basketball one day and political campaigns the next. “I fell in love with journalism. It doesn’t even matter what I cover anymore.”

In May, Aguirre will graduate from California State University, Fullerton, with a major in journalism and a minor in political science. Even though the recent presidential election provided him with great material as a journalist, Aguirre still hopes to return to his passion and cover the National Basketball Association.