Where Are All the Women in Play-by-Play Broadcasting?

This April, Jenny Cavnar got the chance of a lifetime. Cavnar already worked for AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, the TV home of the Colorado Rockies, as an analyst in pre- and postgame coverage, but one Sunday she was informed that she’d get to do play-by-play for a Rockies broadcast for the first time. She was elated. This was a huge deal for her career, and a role women are almost never given—the gig would make Cavnar the first woman in 25 years to call play-by-play for a Major League Baseball game. But she was also nervous. The game against the San Diego Padres was the next day.

She scrambled to come up with a signature home run call, eventually deciding to play on the fountains at Coors Field. The night before her debut, her husband played an MLB: The Show video game between the Rockies and the Padres and she practiced her call whenever an animated Rockie hit the ball out of the park.

She didn’t have to wait long to try it out; the next night, in the bottom of the first inning, Nolan Arenado got ahold of a Bryan Mitchell pitch.

“In my mind I’m going, ‘Oh my gosh, you just have to go for it,’” she told me. The ball sailed over the left-field wall, and she went for it.

“Fire up the fountains!” Cavnar exclaimed. “She’s gone!”

As if on command, the fountains behind center field spouted water. Twitter lit up with its approval of her call, and in July, three months later, the Rockies had a game giveaway—a purple T-shirt with a photo of Arenado’s home run swing and the words “Fire Up the Fountains.”

Sports are all about creating memories. The great ones stick with us. So do the heartbreaking losses, the almost-championships, and the “I can’t believe they just did that” plays. The play-by-play broadcaster becomes the soundtrack to those memories; the very best ones know how to own the big moments without overshadowing them—Chris Berman’s iconic, “He. Could. Go. All. The. Way!” or Vin Scully’s “Hang in there, Ellen,” as Clayton Kershaw’s wife nervously watched her husband try to complete his 2014 no-hitter. I can remember everything about the moment when Cavnar made her home run call: the goosebumps raising on my arms when she summoned the fountains, how she pronounced “gone”—the word rhyming more with “own” than “on.”

The commentators who facilitate those moments—on the radio or television—usually fall into two distinct roles: a play-by-play broadcaster and a color analyst. Many play-by-play broadcasters describe themselves as the “who, what, when, and where,” and the analyst as the “how and the why.” Beth Mowins, a play-by-play titan who has been in the booth for decades doing NCAA football, NFL football, softball on ESPN, and the 2011 Women’s World Cup, says analysts “provide the color to my sort of sketched outline of what’s happening as we tell stories, as we talk strategy, as we describe what’s happening. ... I’m sort of the one that sets it up”—the point guard, if you will—“and the analyst is the one that goes in and fills it in with all the details.” Television broadcasts also often include a sideline analyst to provide interviews and on-the-field insights—that’s where we’re most used to seeing women. Together, these three roles form the team that narrates the game you’re watching.

But for most of sports broadcasting history, these roles have been filled by men. While women have broken into the industry through sideline reporting and analyst positions—Jessica Mendoza in MLB and Doris Burke for the NBA are two high-profile recent examples—the play-by-play role has thus far been most elusive. When I asked Kate Scott, a play-by-play broadcaster for the Pac-12 Network, why she thinks it’s taken so long for women to break into the play-by-play role, she said, “I didn’t even consider it until college, because that’s the first time I heard a woman [Mowins] calling a game. … That didn’t seem like an option. A lot of us [women] went into other aspects of the industry, like reporting.” If you can’t see it, how could you imagine being it?

But Scott says it goes even further than that. “If there’s 10 guys applying for a job, and one woman, there’s more of a possibility that a guy’s going to get hired, just strictly because of the numbers of it,” she says. Plus, many of the people in charge are men, who may be more likely to hire other men for the job. And on top of all of that, women need to have champions in order to succeed in these roles, or “people willing to take the risk.” Hiring a woman to call a sports broadcast still goes against the industry norms and often requires taking a chance on an unknown. But recently, albeit slowly, that’s starting to change.

Amazon Prime announced two weeks ago that it would offer an alternative broadcast experience for Thursday Night Football games this season, one with an all-female broadcast team consisting of industry veterans Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer. It was a boundary-breaking move, and Storm and Kremer became the first all-female broadcast team to call an NFL game. Last season, Mowins became the first woman in 30 years to call an NFL game—and the first woman ever to call one on a national broadcast—when she did play-by-play on a Monday Night Football game (she returned to the MNF booth for a game this season, as well).

But some details of Amazon’s broadcast also drew criticism. The broadcast was rolled out as an alternative to the “traditional” (read: all-male) feed that featured Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, and in order to find the Storm-Kremer broadcast, Prime users have to go under “languages,” where they can select from English (with the traditional broadcast team), Spanish, UK English, or “Storm-Kremer.” (Amazon did not respond to questions about this by press time.)

“I don’t think it was intentional, but it seems very metaphorical to me, like it has to be a different language completely for women to be telling you about football,” says Marisa Ingemi, who has done play-by-play broadcasting for a variety of sports at a variety of levels and spent two seasons as the play-by-play voice for the NWHL’s Boston Pride. “What we think the [play-by-play] job entails or what it ‘should’ sound like, is what white men have made it sound like. That’s the default, almost. If you fall outside that default, that means you’re not doing it ‘right.’”

Through the past several decades, women in the play-by-play role have been the exceptions rather than the rule. One of those exceptions is Suzyn Waldman, whose distinct gravel voice has been part of Yankees broadcasts for the past 32 years. While she does color commentary for Yankees radio broadcasts on WFAN now, she worked as a play-by-play broadcaster in the mid-1990s for local TV broadcasts on WPIX, making her just the third woman to serve in that capacity for a major league team.

When I told Waldman I was working on a story about the growing number of women in play-by-play, her scoff was audible through the phone. “There are?” she asked skeptically. Waldman didn’t think sports broadcasting had changed much since she was hired more than three decades ago. “There’s still me in the booth—I’m still the only one,” she said, referring to the fact she’s the only woman to be a regular broadcaster for a major league baseball team. (Cavnar is still primarily a host and analyst; she filled in for the team’s usual broadcaster, Drew Goodman, on a couple of his off days this season.)

When it comes to the four major men’s sports leagues, there have historically been only a handful of female play-by-play broadcasters. Before Cavnar, Gayle Gardner had been the last woman to do TV play-by-play for an MLB team, with the Rockies in 1993. Mary Shane was the first woman to do it on the radio, for the Chicago White Sox in 1977. In 1987, Gayle Sierens became the first woman to call an NFL game. Last year, the New Jersey Devils chose not to renew the contract of Sherry Ross, who had been doing their color commentary for a decade, and who became the first woman to do play-by-play for an NHL team back in 2009. And in 1988, Leandra Reilly was the first woman to do NBA play-by-play, for a New Jersey Nets–Philadelphia 76ers game.

When Waldman started on the Yankees broadcast in the 1980s, people made it clear to her that she wasn’t wanted there. “I went through years of terrible things. I had people spit at me. I got used condoms in the mail. I had my own police force at the Yankee Stadium in 1989 for a solid year because I was getting death threats,” she says. “I did Broadway for years. There’s nothing worse than that—except this. I think if I had been 20 and starting just out of communication school, I probably wouldn’t [have been] able to do it.”

Broadcasting has long been a male-dominated industry, and as such, women trying to break through face unique challenges—and criticisms. Many women in this field are terrified of making a mistake and giving ammunition to critics who say women can’t do the role well; they feel they need to be 10 times better to be considered one-tenth as good. When a man makes a mistake on a broadcast, it’s just something that happens, he misspoke. When a woman makes a mistake, it’s often used as proof that she’s in over her head or not good enough for the job. That type of attitude is held by many of the people at home watching the game, and it can also extend to others in the press box. “Every time I made a mistake in anything, from 1987 on, it was in the paper,” Waldman says. “Every single time.”

Similar sentiments can be found behind the scenes, too. “There are people who make decisions and bosses who also feel that way,” says Pam Ward, who has done play-by-play for ESPN since 1996, from softball to college football to WNBA basketball. Women are in perpetual prove-themselves mode; Ward calls it “a gap in standards and expectations that needs to close.” Many of the women I spoke to also talked about how important the support of their color analyst and producer is, and how a woman can be set up to fail if she’s not working with a team that wants to make sure she succeeds.

Women are also often siloed to women’s sports. Many of the broadcasters I interviewed pointed out that men are considered qualified to call women’s games, but women are often not considered qualified to call men’s. “There have been some young, really inexperienced guys who’ve gotten opportunities, especially in play-by-play, and there is not a parallel when it comes to women with similar credentials or résumés,” she says.

But women’s sports are also the path of less resistance for some female broadcasters. “You don’t necessarily have to jump over as many hurdles to prove as much,” says Jenn Hildreth, who does mostly NWSL broadcasts for ESPN and the SEC Network and was the only female play-by-play announcer at the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup. “I actually really enjoy women’s sports because I enjoy the opportunity to feel like I’m helping to build something … [but] I really couldn’t tell you that I have a huge desire to try to do men’s sports … it would have to be the right opportunity.”

However, the past few years have seen a steady increase of women entering the role at higher and higher levels. I interviewed 14 women in the field for this story across sports, at all levels, and with different ranges of experience. There are more women in play-by-play broadcasting, more names than I could possibly include here. The women are out there, at major networks like ESPN, the Pac-12 Network, the Big Ten Network, and on local team broadcasts. If you look for them, you’ll see it. But it can still be a rocky road to get there.

A good play-by-play broadcaster has to command authority, according to Dan D’Uva. D’Uva is currently the play-by-play voice of the NHL’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, but he is also an adjunct professor who teaches classes on play-by-play at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, and the media consultant for the Chatham Athletic Association in the Cape Cod Baseball League. D’Uva and many of the women interviewed for this piece say that the play-by-play person is the leader of the broadcast, for lack of a better term, and that leadership is conveyed through their voice.

“The role doesn’t necessarily come natural to a lot of women, especially younger women. We’re not always the most comfortable in those leadership roles,” Mowins says, and her claim is largely backed up by sociological research on voice and gender. Research has shown that both men and women prefer leaders with masculine—i.e. lower-pitched—voices. It’s been found that women today also speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers and grandmothers did. As power dynamics between men and women shift and more and more women enter the workplace, their voices are beginning to mimic men’s. For some women, that might be intentional. Scott tells me that at the beginning of her career, she thought a lot about how she could “stay in the lower register” of her voice: “I’m just trying to match the tone and register of my analyst as much as I can [when I work with a male analyst].”

During a game, broadcasters talk for roughly three hours straight. It’s a long time to listen to anyone’s voice. And research has shown that, when women are in conversation with men, people tend to overestimate how much women speak; they perceive that women talk more than their male counterpart, even when they actually say less. That phenomenon translates to mixed-gender broadcast booths, and female play-by-play broadcasters are almost always paired with a male color analyst, particularly if they’re calling men’s sports.

But the bias goes deeper than just the voice itself. In her book Talking From 9-5: Women and Men at Work, author Deborah Tannen writes that “workplaces that have previously had men in positions of power have already established male-style interaction as the norm. In that sense, women, and others whose styles are different, are not starting out equal, but are at a disadvantage.” The role of a play-by-play broadcaster was created and pioneered by white men, so when audiences turn on a broadcast, they expect to hear the familiar—the sound that was determined by white men.

What happens then when someone who is not a male wants to enter that space? She does not sound like what the audience is used to and, therefore, often receives pushback. It’s usually shrouded in code words: “It’s not that I have a problem with a woman calling the game, it’s just that her voice is so annoying/shrill/grating/insert sexist adjective here.” When people can’t complain about the content of a broadcast—which is often the case when a woman, who has earned her play-by-play role, is on the call—they complain about the intangible thing that a woman can’t control: the way her voice sounds.

“I was born with a lower voice, and I think that that is something that has helped me tremendously,” Ward says. “I’ve talked to some other women who said that they’ve taken voice lessons and done all these other things to try to change their voice as much as they can. But fortunately I did not have to do that.”

D’Uva is quick to point out that working with a voice coach is not exclusive to women. He says that he’s worked with one, and so have many other broadcasters who are trying to improve their vocal quality or are trying to drop regional accents. Still, there have been plenty of male broadcasters with objectively terrible voices—Harry Caray, Hawk Harrelson, and Howard Cosell come to mind—and that didn’t stop them from having success as a broadcaster at the highest levels.

Some women have refused to alter their voices for their broadcast careers and say they’re better off for it. Tiffany Greene, who this season became the first African American woman to call a college football game when ESPN named her its play-by-play broadcaster for HBCU football, says that being a black woman—and just being herself on air—has helped her succeed. “I think they’ve actually embraced [my natural vocal patterns],” she says. “My coordinating producers are encouraging me to be myself, because that’s what makes me, me, and that’s what makes you stand out.” The result has been a broadcast that radiates joy. From her signature “Boy, bye” when a player gets loose, or an emphatic “He DID that!” Greene is not trying to be anyone other than who she is. “You have a lot of voices, and if everyone is all the same, then it may not catch your ear any differently,” she says. “And so I actually thank [my producers] for being bold enough to do that.”

A Greene broadcast sounds vastly different than what you might hear on an everyday baseball broadcast—and it’s generally more fun, too. This MLB season, many viewers have complained that broadcasters (most of them male) seem to hate the sport they’re tasked with calling, and that they don’t seem to be enjoying themselves in the booth. That product is different than what Greene or Angel Gray, a former college basketball player who has worked as an analyst, see as their ultimate goal. “We’re in entertainment,” says Gray, who got her start this year calling television play-by-play for the Los Angeles Sparks. “It’s supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be something that people want to watch.”

That message is something Scott, at the Pac-12 Network, says she’s trying to internalize. A decade into her career, she says she finally feels comfortable enough to let her personality come through on the broadcast, and she’s finally stopped thinking so much about what her voice sounds like. “I’m trying to be more excited about things,” she says. “I think when I was first starting out, [I had] the mentality of trying to blend in, trying not to rock the boat, knowing that I was one of the few women doing this.”

But for all the progress being made, women still face an uphill battle when it comes to landing these roles. A couple of years ago, Ingemi, the Boston Pride broadcaster, interviewed for a job doing play-by-play for a men’s hockey team in Hudson, New Hampshire. “The guy [doing the hiring] called me one day and was like, ‘We like you but our GM and team president are uncomfortable with a woman as the voice of the team,’” she says. “I was genuinely surprised by that, that they gave me that reason. I know I’ve been not hired for stuff before because I’m a woman, but it had never been that blatantly said to me.”

When I reached out to D’Uva about this piece, he says he went through the applications they’ve received throughout the years for the play-by-play internship with the Chatham League. They get approximately 100 applications for two spots per season, and they’ve been running the “school” since 2002. He said the number of female applicants was even fewer than he realized—he estimated that two or three women apply each season. Of the interns he’s had during the past 16 seasons, none have been female. In his TV play-by-play classes at the Newhouse School, he says the breakdown is much more equitable, estimating it as 65 percent men and 35 percent women. He brought Mowins, a Syracuse University alumna, in to speak with his class once. “A lot of students in my classes point to her as an inspiration,” he says, “[saying] ‘if she can do it, I want to give it a try.’”

It’s been proved over and over again that representation matters. Each of the women I spoke to credited a woman who came before her for helping realize this career path could be an option. “I remember seeing Phyllis George on the NFL Today Show back in the mid-’70s and thinking, ‘There’s a woman talking about football, that’d be something I’d be really interested in doing,’” says Mowins. Greene cites Robin Roberts (she “is my everything, I just look up to her. She’s a GOAT in my mind.”), and Gray says that now Greene is her mentor. They also credit other women in the field with providing invaluable support needed to succeed in a still male-dominated and often hostile industry. Just as important, they tell me, are the men who champion and respect and encourage them.

When we talk about her historic home run call and the giddy reaction from her color analysts, Ryan Spilborghs and Jeff Huson, Cavnar cannot stress enough how the Rockies organization has rallied around her. “I get emotional talking about it,” she says, “because I was blown away by the support of our analysts. These guys played baseball at such a high [MLB] level and they were the ones that encouraged me the most and said, ‘You can do this. You know baseball. You’re going to bring a different voice to the table. We’re with you in this.’” Cavnar is sure that things are changing for women in the broadcast booth, even in the notoriously “traditional” sport of baseball.

The first time Waldman and I spoke, she said, “I have a terrible fear that once I leave the broadcast booth, no other woman will be hired, because then they’ll go to an ex-player, and all of it will have been for nothing.” But a week after our interview, Waldman emailed me. She’d met two young women working in play-by-play for a minor league team in just two weeks—Emma Tiedemann, who calls games for the Lexington Legends, the Single-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, and another young woman who has an offer pending with another MiLB Class A team. Two years ago, Kirsten Karbach was the only woman doing play-by-play for an MiLB-affiliated team (the Philadelphia Phillies’ high-A affiliate, the Clearwater Threshers). She may soon be one of three.

Waldman wanted me to know about this latest addition. She seemed a bit awed, and perhaps, even hopeful: “It’s more [women] than I’ve heard of in all these years.”