In the late 1980s, when “SportsCenter” legend Linda Cohn wanted to advance her career from a Long Island news station, she one day baked a large batch of chocolate chip cookies for her camera operator. It was a bribe to convince him to stay late to help her film a sports special she was sending to TV stations in pursuit of her dream job as a sportscaster.
Fortunately for Cohen, Seattle’s CBS affiliate, KIRO-TV, gave her a chance. The Long Island native had been covering sports in the Pacific Northwest for a little over two years, until she got the endorsement that would change her life. It wasn’t all cake and baker’s cake when Cohen moved across the country in 1992 to join ESPN and the stellar team of anchors who ran its flagship news show, “SportsCenter.”
“Before, the description of women in sports was, ‘Oh, they can’t handle the pressure. What if the stimulator falls off? Their tone is too high or too low,’” Cohen recalls. “And they would just make excuses after excuses.”
But ESPN changed everything. “ESPN gave me this opportunity. [Executives] “John Walsh and Steve Anderson hired me and believed in me,” she says.
As ESPN celebrates its 45th anniversary today — the sports and entertainment network launched from Bristol, Connecticut, at 7 p.m. ET on Sept. 7 — the network that redefined sports television has been a big part of the rapid growth women’s sports have seen this year. Cohn and fellow ESPN anchor Hannah Storm spoke to diverse On the role of the global leader in creating a greater platform for women's college and professional teams and leagues, as well as for women working in sports.
Linda Cohen
“ESPN has become part of the fabric of generations. I call it America’s backdrop because it’s everywhere. It’s in every taxi, it’s in every airport. SportsCenter is one of the great brands in the history of television,” Storm says.
Storm joined ESPN in 2008 after stints at NBC Sports, CNN and as a morning anchor on CBS’s “The Early Show.” She was the WNBA’s first female game announcer when the league launched in 1997. She saw firsthand how ESPN’s 24/7 presence gave the fledgling league oxygen. The surge in interest fueled by the strength of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball tournament has been long anticipated.
“ESPN has always put resources into supporting women’s basketball. They’ve hired the best networks to cover women’s basketball. They’ve aired women’s basketball games as well as men’s basketball games,” Storm says. “It was all set up to be a perfect storm for what happened last year.”
The first female broadcaster to join ESPN full-time was Rhonda Glenn in 1981. Glenn, who died at age 68 in 2015, was a prominent golfer at the college and amateur levels.
She worked as a golf analyst for ABC Sports (long before ABC and ESPN were linked through Disney ownership) for the three years before she moved to “SportsCenter.” In his new book, “The Early Days of ESPN,” author Peter Fox describes Glenn as ESPN’s “Sally Ride.”
In a 2013 ESPN Front Row profile, Glenn said she never felt driven to break barriers. Like Cohn, she loved sports, especially golf.
“I never wanted to be first, I just wanted to get the job,” Glenn told ESPN.
Rhonda Glenn in 2013 (Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images)
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Glenn stayed in Bristol for only two years before leaving to pursue other careers in sports, including more golf coverage for ABC Sports and a communications job for the USGA. But her ethos that women who know what they’re doing can be just as powerful on air as male broadcasters remains strong.
It took Cohn about a year to find her footing at ESPN. Eventually, she heard her bosses loud and clear when they gave her some direct feedback: “They finally said to me, ‘Linda, we see you in the newsroom. We hear you talking about sports, of course.’ They wanted me to be on the air. And I said, ‘Great. I can do that,’” she recalls.
If Glenn is Sally Ride, Conn is ESPN’s Sue Bird. By February 2016, she had a record 5,000 episodes of “SportsCenter.” She will celebrate 30 years on the brand in 2022. Conn’s longevity has been 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 — they became anchors or sideline reporters,” Cohn says. “And they say, ‘Seeing you there on SportsCenter made me believe that women can do this. That people aren’t going to look at us like we’re from Mars. It’s OK to be a woman and love sports.’”
Cohn, who also contributes to ESPN’s coverage of the NHL, grew up playing coed field hockey on Long Island. Storm has been immersed in sports since childhood. Her late father, Mike Stern, was a team owner, general manager and commissioner of the American Basketball Association, which merged with the NBA in 1976. She credits one of her father’s successors in the NBA — longtime commissioner David Stern — with planting the seeds for the modern expansion of women’s professional basketball more than 25 years ago.
Stern was president of the National Basketball Association from 1984 to 2014. He saw an opportunity emerging in women's basketball—and 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 the league's launch in the Women's National Basketball Association the following year.
The opportunity for female college stars to make the jump to an established professional league in the United States has been a huge boost for women’s sports. The college basketball stars who took the spotlight at this year’s March Madness tournament—Kaitlyn Clark, Camila Cardoso, and Angel Reyes, among others—have never known a world without the WNBA. ESPN set an NCAA ratings record in April with its coverage of the women’s championship game.
“Women’s basketball viewership has been going up exponentially. The fans have been there,” Storm says. “What happened this year is that a whole bunch of other people have joined the team. College basketball has captured their imagination because the games have been amazing and these special characters and skills of these players have given themselves to the kind of rivalry, the kind of ferocity, the kind of competitiveness that we’re used to seeing in men. It’s been so fierce and so competitive and so visible, and it’s been fodder for sports talk and things beyond the highlights that have taken interest in the game to literally another level,” Storm says.
Cohen says one of the biggest milestones the industry has seen is a generational shift in mindset about women covering sports, working as coaches, and in the front office.
The now-clichéd sports movie scene of athletes getting angry when a female reporter enters the locker room was a regular occurrence early in her career, Cohn says. Today, ESPN has at least seven female anchors for its various “SportsCenter” programs throughout the day.
“The athletes we interview now grew up with women covering sports, so that’s not an issue,” Cohn says. “I’ve always felt strongly that it’s very important to have women in these environments to show that they belong and that they really want to be there. If you’re out there doing sports as a stepping stone to getting to Hollywood or something, athletes see that right away. They can pick out a fake person a mile away. Yeah, they’re tougher on women.”
Storm believes that ESPN and its depth of coverage around the clock have helped enhance the impact of sports in popular culture.
“It allowed sports to be elevated to a higher level of analysis,” Storm says. “I was there at the Boston Marathon bombing. I was there at the Penn State thing, and when Michael Sam was out when he played in the NFL. I was there at things we don’t talk about in sports,” Storm says.
“But because ESPN was a news network, we were able to not only cover everything that happened in depth. And with ESPN having the ability to cover these events, ESPN began to bring new voices into the arena, including voices we hadn’t heard before,” Storm notes.
All of these areas have evolved into a vibrant sports media ecosystem fueled by the influence of live events, linear TV, streaming and social media, Storm said. And that expansion across multiple platforms — Cohn and Storm now also host a fan-focused podcast — has naturally opened more doors for women.
“It's been great to see so many great female broadcasters getting opportunities that they never had before,” Storm says. “It's been a really great development.”
(Top photo: Hannah Storm and National Women's Soccer League Commissioner Jessica Berman on “SportsCenter” in April.)
