Caley Chelios sits in the media room at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, using a yellow highlighter to pore over game notes for the Lightning-Sabres matchup that night.
Chelios, 25, the daughter of Hall of Famer Chris Chelios, is the color analyst on Lightning radio broadcasts with Dave Mishkin for most road games, like this one on Nov. 13. She’s waiting for Sabres coach Phil Housley’s press conference.
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So is Allison “A.J.” Mleczko, 43, the color analyst for the NBCSN broadcast that night. In April, Mleczko became the first woman to be in the booth for an NHL playoff game. The gold medalist has covered five Olympic Games.
“She’s who I want to be,” Chelios said.
That night, both Chelios and Mleczko broadcasted an NHL game.
It was largely unheard of a decade or two ago, but you’re now seeing a well-deserved bump in opportunities for women in professional hockey broadcasting. Women have followed the lead of trailblazers like Sportsnet’s Christine Simpson and Cassie Campbell-Pascall and NBC’s Cammi Granato and Kathryn Tappen. There’s Mleczko and Jennifer Botterill now on Islanders broadcasts, and Campbell is doing color in Calgary. Leah Hextall was a finalist for a radio play-by-play gig with the AHL’s San Diego Gulls.
With the growth of women’s hockey and the gradually increasing open-mindedness of network executives, the hockey world seems to be welcoming a number of fresh faces and voices.
“You look at where women are playing at the highest level,” said NBCSN executive producer and president Sam Flood, the first to put a woman (Granato) between the benches. “There are a group of ladies who really know the game. They should have a platform to continue on with. It’s still the same rink, same subject, same strategy. There’s every reason to give women the platform they deserve to broadcast the game.”
Women in other sports have taken the lead, like Doris Burke in the NBA and Jessica Mendoza on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball.” Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm do an online telecast for the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.”
Now hockey is getting into the game. As legendary NBC broadcaster Mike “Doc” Emrick says, ‘They’ve earned it.”
“I think the more people that see it opens up their minds to say, ‘OK, this isn’t crazy, this isn’t a gimmick,'” Simpson said. “These are all very qualified women at what they’re doing. Why should that be so bizarre? The more we see (women in these roles), I think it’s taken longer than it should have. But I’m very happy to at least see it coming.”
Chelios grew up a rink rat.
She watched her father, Chris, near the end of his Hall of Fame career, and she fondly recalled posing for a photo with the Stanley Cup on his day in Detroit with hockey’s holy grail.
Her brothers, Dean, 29, and Jake, 27, played hockey. So did Caley, who went as far as high school before switching to lacrosse full-time as a student-athlete at Northwestern.
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Chelios, like most college kids, didn’t know what she wanted to do career-wise. One day, though, she was watching hockey with her dad, and Tappen popped on the screen. Formerly of NHL Network, Tappen is in the studio for NBCSN broadcasts for the NHL, Notre Dame and the Olympics.
“You should do that,” her father said.
Tappen and Simpson, a 20-year veteran at Sportsnet, are two of the standard bearers for young female broadcasters. Simpson got her start in 1998 without any broadcast experience or education. Like Chelios, she grew up with her family in and around the game, including her brother, former NHLer Craig Simpson.
“We watched ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ every Saturday night, and there were no women,” Simpson said. “I could never go, ‘I want to be her one day.’
“I never even thought that it was possible.”
Simpson, 54, got into broadcasting indirectly through her work as the marketing manager for the Hockey Hall of Fame. When it opened in Toronto in 1993, the Hall would invite teams and networks to the shrine for tours. Simpson served as the unofficial media spokesperson.
“I’d often have (TV) producers say, ‘Boy, you really know about hockey and seem comfortable in front of a camera. You ever think about working in TV?'”
The Leafs hired Simpson in 1995 to be their first arena host. Now most every team has someone in a similar position, doing intermission interviews on the jumbotron and on-camera features for the team website – it’s the job Chelios was originally hired for, too. Simpson got her shot when Sportsnet opened in 1998, and gave her a chance.
“If it weren’t for that,” Simpson said. “I don’t think I would be in the business.”
NBCSN was the first network to put a female between the benches on a broadcast with Granato in 2006. Granato, one of the first women voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, was on the gold-medal-winning U.S. women’s hockey team in 1998. Mleczko was on that historic team, too. Cassie Campbell captained Canada to back-to-back gold medals in 2002 and 2006.
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The growth in the women’s game clearly led to greater diversity in the broadcasting pool, according to Jeff Filippi, MSG Networks’ senior VP of programming and production. MSG hired Mleczko and Botterill to split a 50-55 game rotation as studio color analysts with host Shannon Hogan.
“People are looking to bring interesting people on the air to grow the audience, grow the game,” Filippi said. “The expansion of women’s hockey, the expansion and notoriety of women’s Olympic hockey is part of it. There are more really great candidates. If you go back 20 years ago, it wasn’t the case. It wasn’t the women’s fault — (it was) just their game wasn’t getting the recognition that it’s getting now.
“Probably the turning point was when the USA won the Olympics in ’98 and those great battles with Canada over the last 15 years. It’s elevated the game, and with the people who played the game, there’s a pool of candidates.”
Mleczko will never forget her first audition with NBC back in 2005. She was in a studio with the legendary Emrick, and they had to call the Americans’ 2002 gold-medal-game loss to the Canadians in Salt Lake City.
“It was heart-breaking, I had never watched it,” Mleczko said. “I was sweating, but Doc was so supportive. He knew I was nervous.”
Mleczko laughs. She used to hate Campbell, her rival on Team Canada. Now they’re friends and broadcasting peers. Campbell-Pascall does color for Flames broadcasts on Sportsnet. “She’s one of the best,” Mleczko said.
Campbell-Pascall retired from playing in 2006 and started that same year with Sportsnet’s “Hockey Night in Canada.” Her first day on the job, she was hosting “The Battle of Alberta,” Calgary vs. Edmonton.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said.
They taped an interview with then-Oilers coach Craig MacTavish. Ron MacLean sent the feed over to Campbell-Pascall, who was on site.
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“I went to introduce Craig MacTavish and I forgot his name,” Campbell-Pascall said, laughing. “So he hugged me. He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do it again.’ I thought, I bet he’s never hugged (fellow Sportsnet broadcaster Scott Oake). I kind of knew I had an in. The guys had my back because they knew I was doing something new.”
Chelios had a tough choice after finishing her undergrad at Northwestern.
She could take a job at Merrill Lynch. That would be the safe route.
Or she could go on to graduate school in broadcast journalism. Her dad supported her following her dream, recalling how much he wished his sisters would have had this type of opportunity in the 1980s and ’90s.
“Go for it,” the Hall of Fame defenseman said.
There were some tough moments for Chelios, who struggled to get any job leads over a five-month period in the summer of 2016 when she was graduating. She’d chase any assignment she could find, from Champaign to Chicago.
“It was frustrating,” Chelios said. “I was eating Oreos and ramen for a year in grad school and was tired all the time. I did reporting on the weekend. I still wasn’t that confident, but I had to work to get it.”
She did get an offer from the AHL’s Chicago Wolves for a 20-game stint. It was close to home. But Chelios kept looking.
With her fiancé, NFL fullback Danny Vitale, in training camp with the Buccaneers that fall, she explored Tampa. She called the Rays, Bucs, Rowdies and Lightning, getting in touch with broadcast director Matt Sammon.
Sammon didn’t have a job for Chelios, but he liked her tape — and her attitude. They met in Tampa with Lightning executive VP Bill Wickett.
“I told Bill, ‘She has a really bright future,”‘ Sammon recalled. “It’s going to take 2-3 years to crack that potential. But it’s there.”
Not too long after, Lightning feature reporter Michelle Gingras gave the team her two weeks’ notice; she was moving on. They called Chelios back.
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“Perfect timing,” Chelios said.
Like with Campbell and Mleczko, there were some growing pains with Chelios.
With the Lightning expanding their coverage on an online radio station, Lightning Power Play, and debuting “Morning Skate Show,” Chelios had many more opportunities to hone her craft. She’ll never forget one blooper moment last year when the NHL’s Centennial Celebration came to Tampa.
Chelios was doing an online broadcast from a truck outside the arena, and she had a Ron Burgundy moment during which she was reading the teleprompter a bit too literally.
“It’s going to be a fun day. Exclamation point,” she blurted on air.
Chelios laughs about it now. “It was epic. Brutal,” she said. “Every now and then people still bring it up. ‘Exclamation point.‘”
Sammon said Chelios is her own harshest critic and that she has a tremendous work ethic, which has allowed her to excel on a short, tight learning curve. So when Mishkin suggested in a meeting over the summer that Chelios potentially join him in the booth to do color, everyone was open to it.
“The lightbulb went off,” Sammon said. “It was a no-brainer.”
There aren’t a lot of women like Chelios doing color on radio broadcasts.
Sherry Ross was a pioneer as analyst on Devils’ broadcasts in the early 1990s, including being part of NHL Radio broadcast of 1994 Stanley Cup Final: she started a second stint as Devils analyst in 2007. Part of the challenge is getting reps. Like with TV, when Mleczko would have to wait literally years between spans of broadcasts for the Olympics, there’s not an easy avenue to work on it.
Just ask Leah Hextall.
Hextall, 39, the cousin of Hall of Fame goalie Ron Hextall, is in Winnipeg. When she was let go as part of recent layoffs at Sportsnet, she struggled to find jobs in the traditional markets (in-game host, rinkside/feature reporter, etc.). So Hextall tried to pivot into play-by-play.
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She reached out to Emrick, who has always been gracious with his time in terms of listening to aspiring broadcasters’ tapes and offering feedback. “I think (Hextall) may become the first female to do play-by-play in the NHL,” Emrick said.
Hextall was a finalist for the AHL San Diego Gulls’ play-by-play gig. She has, however, called games for the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, making history by calling the Clarkson Cup with Campbell-Pascall last season.
Hextall is always refining her craft. Winnipeg’s AHL affiliate, the Manitoba Moose, let Hextall use an empty broadcast booth to do her own play-by-play calls each game. They aren’t aired anywhere; they’re simply more practice for Hextall.
She is thankful, saying that this movement to allow more women into broadcasting is partly due to all the “male allies” in the business. And some tough women.
“This is not an easy thing to do. You know you’re taking a risk,” Hextall said. “The fact is people don’t like change. Just the sound of a female voice is different in these roles. It’s not something we’re accustomed to. I’m used to hearing a male voice.
“You have to have courage in yourself to put yourself out there.”
Most of the feedback, however, has been been positive for female broadcasters. Network executives get anecdotal praise from viewers. For the most part, the broadcast-crew brethren have welcomed them with open arms.
And players have been respectful, too, often speaking to Mleczko and company like the fellow athletes they are. Campbell-Pascall, who is married to Flames assistant GM Brad Pascall, has to often double check with players what is inside information and what’s on the record.
“If you know the game, you know the game. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female,” Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said. “Now, for us, you see broadcasts on NHL Network, TSN, Sportsnet, and there’s definitely a lot more women than when I was growing up. They do a great job. I think it’s only going to continue to grow.”
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One day in the not too distant future, we could have an all-female NHL broadcast booth. Maybe Chelios is doing color, Hextall the play-by-play. Network executives say it’s just a matter of time.
Sammon thought about this when turning on the Lightning-Sabres broadcast Nov. 13. Chelios was doing color on the radio, Mleczko on NBCSN.
“I turned on my TV, and it dawned on me: I’m not sure if this is in the record book, but this is really cool,” Sammon said. “I really do think sooner rather than later it’s going to become a norm, just having more women involved in the actual play of the game call. I want to hear play-by-play. Women are out there. There are women in the college ranks, and high school ranks that can do this.
“I think that’s part of the bigger picture. Caley is a very good representative of this movement. I honestly think, as much as Kathryn and A.J., Caley is going to be one of those names in eight to 10 years from now, where someone in her position now is going to say, ‘Hey, I heard you on the radio broadcast. I heard you on TV.’ I think it’s going to continue to pay it forward.”
(Top photo of Caley Chelios: Joe Smith / The Athletic)
