In the late 1980s, when future “SportsCenter” legend Linda Cohn was looking to move up in her career in cable news on Long Island, she one day made a large batch of chocolate chip cookies for her cameraman. It was a bribe to persuade him to stay late to help her film a special sports report that she sent to TV stations in search of her dream job as a sports presenter.
Luckily for Cohn, Seattle’s CBS affiliate KIRO-TV gave her a chance. The Long Island native covered sports in the Pacific Northwest for a little more than two years until she got the nod that would change her life. There were no baked goods involved when Cohn returned across the country in 1992 to join ESPN and the formidable group of anchors leading its flagship news program, “SportsCenter.”
“Previously the label on women in sports was, ‘Oh, they can’t handle the pressure. What if the Prompter fails? Their pitch is too high or too low.” It was excuse after excuse,” Cohn recalls.
But ESPN’s presence changed everything. “ESPN gave me that opportunity. [Executives] John Walsh and Steve Anderson hired me and believed in me,” she says.
With ESPN turning 45 today — the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network launched from Bristol, Connecticut on September 7 at 7 p.m. — the network that redefined sports television is of course a big part of the growth spurt that women’s sports has experienced. this year. Cohn and fellow ESPN host Hannah Storm spoke Variety on the Worldwide Leader’s role in creating a greater platform for women’s collegiate and professional leagues and teams, as well as women in sports.
“ESPN has become part of the fabric of generations. I call it America’s wallpaper because it is everywhere. It is in every taxi and at every airport. And ‘SportsCenter’ is one of the great brands in the history of television,” says Storm.
Storm joined ESPN in 2008 after stints at NBC Sports and CNN and a stint as a morning TV host on CBS’ “The Early Show.” She was the first play-by-play announcer for the WNBA when the league started in 1997. She saw with her own eyes how ESPN’s 24/7 presence gave the young league oxygen. The surge of interest fueled by the strength of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball tournament has been a long time coming.
“ESPN has always put resources into women’s basketball. They put top channels on women’s basketball. They broadcast women’s basketball like they broadcast men’s basketball,” Storm said. “The design was there for this kind of perfect storm for what’s happened over the last year.”
The first female anchor to join ESPN full-time was Rhonda Glenn in 1981. Glenn, who died in 2015 at age 68, had been a prominent collegiate and amateur golfer.
She had worked as a golf analyst for ABC Sports (long before ABC and ESPN were connected through Disney) in the three years prior to her move to “SportsCenter.” In his new book “The Early Days of ESPN,” author Peter Fox calls Glenn “ESPN’s” Sally Ride.
In a 2013 profile for ESPN Front Row, Glenn claimed that she never felt driven to be a barrier breaker. Like Cohn, she simply loved sports, especially golf.
“I never wanted to be first, I just wanted the job,” Glenn told ESPN.
Glenn spent just two years in Bristol before leaving for other sporting gigs, including more golf reporting for ABC Sports and a job in communications for the US Golf Association. But her ethos that savvy women can be just as strong on air as male anchors remains strong.
It took Cohn about a year to gain a foothold on ESPN. Finally, she heard her bosses loud and clear when they gave her some blunt feedback: “They finally said to me, ‘Linda, we’ll see you in the newsroom. Of course we hear you talking about sports.’ They wanted me to be like that on air. And I’m like, ‘Great. I can do that,” she recalls.
If Glenn is the Sally Ride, then Cohn is ESPN’s Sue Bird. In February 2016, she logged a record 5,000 episodes of ‘SportsCenter’. In 2022, she will have been with the brand for 30 years. Cohn’s longevity itself was significant for women in sports media.
“I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and say, ‘I grew up with you.’ And then they tell me their stories – later they became broadcasters or sideline reporters,” says Cohn. “And they say when I saw you there on ‘SportsCenter,’ I believed a woman could do this. That people wouldn’t look at us as if we were from Mars. It’s okay to be a woman and love sports.”
Cohn, who also contributes to ESPN’s NHL coverage, grew up playing ice hockey with boys in high school on Long Island. Storm has been steeped in sports since childhood. Her late father, Mike Storen, was a team owner, general manager of the team and commissioner of the American Basketball Association, which merged with the National Basketball Association in 1976. She credits one of her father’s NBA successors — longtime commissioner David Stern — with planting the seeds for today’s expansion of professional women’s basketball more than 25 years ago.
Stern led the NBA from 1984 to 2014. He saw opportunity emerging in women’s basketball — and he used the success of the U.S. women’s basketball team at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta to convince NBA team owners to invest in an expansion league . Stern championed its launch into the Women’s National Basketball Association the following year.
The opportunity for top female stars to move on to an established professional league in the US has been a huge boost for the cause of women’s sports. The college hoops stars who took the spotlight in this year’s March Madness — Caitlin Clark, Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese, among others — never knew a world without the WNBA. ESPN set an NCAA ratings record in April with its coverage of the women’s championship game.
“The ratings for women’s basketball are steadily increasing. The fans were there,” says Storm. “What happened this year was a whole group of other people jumped on board. College basketball captured the imagination because the games were incredible and these specific personalities and skills of these players lent themselves to the kind of rivalry, the kind of ferocity, and the kind of competitiveness that we’re used to seeing in men. It was so intense and so competitive and so in your face, and such things from sports debate shows and things beyond highlights, that it literally took the interest in the game to another level,” says Storm.
According to Cohn, another major milestone for the industry is a generational shift in the mindset around women in sports, working as coaches and in front offices.
The now cliché scene in every sports movie where athletes panic when a female sportscaster enters a locker room? That happened all the time in her early career, Cohn says. Today, ESPN has as many as seven female anchors for its various “SportsCenter” broadcasts throughout the day.
“The athletes we’re interviewing now grew up with women playing sports, so that’s not a problem,” Cohn says. “I’ve always felt strongly that it’s really important to have women in these environments so that they can show that they belong and that they really want to be there. If you do sports there as a stepping stone to ‘Access Hollywood’ or something, athletes see right through it. They can pick out a fake from a mile away. And yes, they are stricter on women.”
Storm credits ESPN and the depth of its coverage across each daypart for increasing sports’ influence in popular culture.
“It allowed the sport to go to the next level of analysis,” Storm said. “I served on the Boston Marathon bombing station. I’ve been on the desk for everything that happened at Penn State, for Michael Sam, who came out when he played in the NFL. Ray Rice. I have been there for things that we didn’t talk about in sports,” says Storm.
“But because ESPN was a news network, we couldn’t just cover the breadth of everything that was happening in depth. When ESPN had the opportunity to cover them, ESPN started bringing new voices to the table, including voices we hadn’t heard before,” Storm notes.
These have all grown into a vibrant sports media ecosystem, powered by the flywheel effect of live events, linear and streaming TV and social media, Storm said. That expansion across multiple platforms — both Cohn and Storm now also host fan-focused podcasts — has obviously opened more doors for women.
“It was great to see so many fantastic female broadcasters given opportunities that they hadn’t had before,” says Storm. “It was a very, very, very cool evolution to see.”
(Pictured at top: Hannah Storm and Jessica Berman, commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, on “SportsCenter” in April)