It's entirely possible that I missed the point of your post, but let me respond not about the athletics but about the journalism. The person whose post you quoted was paraphrasing Geno, summarizing what the poster thought Geno said. He was not quoting Geno. To do that, he would have to put quotation marks around the words, which would mean, in journalistic terms, that Geno said those exact words.
If you are saying that what reporters do is summarize a person's comments and then put quotes around them and call it good, well, I would agree with you. That violates all the rules. Readers should be able to know that when they see quotation marks, the words are just what the quoted person said (perhaps grammatically cleaned up, but nothing changed other than that). I cannot imagine why a reporter would summarize what a person said and put quotes around it when paraphrasing is perfectly ok to do and gives the reader a better picture of whether or not the speaker said those actual words. As long as the paraphrase is accurate, of course, and that's where journalistic judgment and skill come in.
On the other hand, if what you are saying was that there was a quote from Geno, then the reporter's assessment, and then another quote from Geno, that is not a "journalistic practice." That's called writing, and there are a number of reasons to do it. Let's assume, for the moment, that it's an accurate summary of what Geno said on that subject. It may be that when Geno said it, he said it in a way that does not lend itself to direct quotation (remember that what's between the quotes should be exactly what the guy said). It may be that when Geno said it, he sprinkled his words with vulgarisms (What? Geno? Heaven forfend!!), and the reporter could not make it into a cogherent sentence once those were deleted.
Or it may simply be that the reporter needed to break up the text. You cannot have the story be one big quote from Geno. If that were the case, the reporter would be a transcriptionist and nothing more. The reporter is being paid to add his/her knowledge of the situation and the people involved so the story becomes a narrative that the reader can learn from. If the story is about Geno, it should end up being Geno's story, but the reporter's knowledge and skill will help knit the story together in a way that's more informative than just a bunch of quotes strung together with punctuation marks.
If the reporter's paraphrase is not accurate, all bets are off. They failed at their job.
