Mepham grad covers the Mets for a living

Adam Rubin, a sports journalist who graduated from Mepham High School in North Bellmore, is now in Port St. Lucie, Fla., covering the Mets’ spring training for the 10th consecutive year. Rubin will be there until April, when he’ll follow the Mets home as they begin the regular season.

“Certainly, being in the winter in Florida for seven weeks is not the worst thing in the world,” Rubin joked in a recent interview.

Since 2010, Rubin, 38, has been the lead Mets beat writer for espnnewyork.com. Before that, he covered the Mets for the Daily News, where he worked for 10 years.

Rubin is well known in the world of sports journalism, boasting more than 23,000 followers on his Twitter site. But he has traveled a long road to get to this point –– one that began in Bellmore.

Rubin, who was born in the Bronx, moved to Bellmore with his family in 1981, when he was in third grade. He attended Saw Mill Road Elementary School and then Jerusalem Avenue Middle School for a year before it closed and he moved to Grand Avenue Middle School. He graduated from Mepham in 1991.

He wasn’t a big Mets fan as a child, Rubin recalled. He rooted for the Mets and Yankees, and had Islanders season tickets. While at Mepham, he was the yearbook editor, but he didn’t write for the school newspaper. He went to college to study business.

Rubin attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in economics. It was then that he first got involved in journalism, interning in the summers for a now defunct South Shore weekly newspaper group.

After graduating from Wharton in 1995, he landed a one-year internship at the Birmingham News in Birmingham, Ala. His tenure there coincided with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The soccer competition took place in Birmingham, and Rubin covered the action.

Shortly afterward, he was hired full-time by the News, and covered government and police news. He wanted to write about sports, but the newspaper didn’t have an opening in its sports department, so he moved to Shreveport, La., to cover sports for the Shreveport Times.