In the late 1980s, when future “SportsCenter” legend Linda Cohn was looking to advance her career from cable news on Long Island, she baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies for a cameraman one day as a bribe to convince him to help her film a sports report to send to a television station in hopes of landing her dream job as a sports anchor.
Luckily for Cohn, Seattle’s CBS affiliate KIRO-TV took a chance on her. A Long Island native, she covered sports in the Pacific Northwest for just over two years before landing a job that would change her life. When Cohn moved across the country to join ESPN in 1992, and join the powerhouse of anchors leading its flagship news show, “SportsCenter,” there were no baked goods.
“The labels on women in sports were: ‘I can’t handle the pressure. What if the teleprompter falls over? My voice is too high or too low.’ It was a whole series of excuses,” Cone recalled.
But ESPN changed all that. “ESPN gave me that opportunity. (Executives) John Walsh and Steve Anderson hired me and believed in me,” she says.
ESPN celebrates its 45th anniversary today. The entertainment and sports programming network sets sail from Bristol, Connecticut on September 7 at 7pm ET. The network that redefined sports television is, unsurprisingly, a big part of the rapid growth that women’s sports have enjoyed this year. Cohn and fellow longtime ESPN anchor Hannah Storm spoke with Variety about the global leader’s role in creating a larger platform for women’s colleges, professional leagues, women’s teams and women in sports.
“ESPN has been a part of people’s lives for generations. I call it the wallpaper of America because it’s everywhere — in every taxi, every airport. And SportsCenter is one of the great brands in the history of television,” Storm said.
Storm joined ESPN in 2008 after working for NBC Sports and CNN and as a morning anchor on CBS’s “The Early Show.” She was the first play-by-play announcer for the WNBA when the league launched in 1997. She witnessed how ESPN’s 24/7 coverage energized the fledgling league, and the groundswell of interest, fueled by the strength of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball tournament, was long overdue.
“ESPN has always put money into women’s basketball. They’ve always had top announcers for women’s basketball. They’ve always broadcast women’s basketball just like they broadcast men’s basketball,” Storm said. “What’s happened over the last year is just a recipe for disaster.”
The first female anchor to join ESPN full-time was Rhonda Glenn in 1981. Glenn, who died in 2015 at age 68, was a prominent collegiate and amateur golfer.
She worked as a golf commentator for ABC Sports (long before ABC and ESPN partnered through Disney’s ownership) for three years before moving to “SportsCenter.” In his new book, “ESPN’s First Fever,” author Peter Fox calls Glenn “the Sally Ride of ESPN.”
In a 2013 profile for ESPN’s Front Row, Glenn insisted she never set out to be a barrier breaker — like Cone, she just loved sports, especially golf.
“I never wanted to be first, I just wanted the job,” Glenn told ESPN.
Glenn only stayed at Bristol for two years before leaving for other sports jobs, including golf coverage for ABC Sports and a PR role for the United States Golf Association, but her belief remains strong that women who know their stuff can be just as effective in broadcasting as their male counterparts.
It took Cohn about a year to find her footing at ESPN. When she finally received some honest feedback from her bosses, she heard them loud and clear: “They finally told me, ‘Linda, we see you in the newsroom, we hear you naturally talking about sports.’ That’s what they wanted me to be on-air. I said, ‘Great. I can do that,'” she recalls.
If Glenn is Sally Ride, Cohn is ESPN’s Sue Bird. By February 2016, Cohn had appeared on SportsCenter for a record 5,000 episodes. In 2022, she will celebrate her 30th year with the brand. Cohn’s longevity has been significant for women in sports media.
“I have so many people who come up to me and say, ‘I grew up with you,’ and they tell me their stories. They became announcers or sideline reporters,” Cohn says, “and they say they saw you on SportsCenter and it made them believe that women could do this, that people wouldn’t look at us like we were Martians. It’s OK to be a woman and love sports.”
Cone, who also contributes to ESPN’s NHL coverage, grew up playing ice hockey with the boys in high school on Long Island. Storm has been deeply involved in the sports business since she was a child. Her late father, Mike Storen, was a team owner, team general manager and commissioner of the American Basketball Association, which merged with the National Basketball Association in 1976. She credits one of her father’s successors, longtime commissioner David Stern, with sowing the seeds for the current expansion of women’s professional basketball more than 25 years ago.
Stern led the NBA 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 Atlanta Summer Olympics to convince NBA team owners to invest in an expansion league. Stern led the launch of the Women’s Basketball Association (WNBA) the following year.
The opportunity for top female college stars to move to established professional leagues in the U.S. has been a major boost for women’s sports. College basketball stars who garnered attention during this year’s March Madness — Caitlin Clark, Camila Cardoso and Angel Reese — have never known a world without the WNBA. ESPN set an NCAA ratings record for its broadcast of the women’s championship game in April.
“Women’s basketball viewership has been steadily increasing, and the fans have been supportive,” Storm said. “This year, we’ve had a lot of other people join in. College basketball has captured people’s hearts because the games are great and the personalities and skills of the players exude the rivalry, intensity and competitive spirit that we often see in men’s basketball. It’s so intense, so competitive and so gripping, it’s gone beyond sports discussion shows and highlights and it’s literally taken interest in basketball to a new level.”
In Cohn’s view, a generational shift in attitudes toward women covering sports and working in coaching and front offices marked another major milestone for the industry.
Cohn said that in the early days of her career, a now-classic scene in sports movies in which players get angry when a female sports reporter walks into the locker room happened all the time. Today, ESPN has as many as seven female anchors on various “SportsCenter” shows that air 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 really important that we show that women are in those spaces and that they belong there and that they really want to be there. If you’re in sports as a stepping stone to ‘Access Hollywood’ or something, athletes see through that right away. They can see through a fake right away, and they’re certainly harder on women.”
Storm credits ESPN and its in-depth coverage across all time slots with increasing the sport’s influence across popular culture.
“Sports has been able to take analytics to the next level,” Storm said. “I did the Boston Marathon bombing investigation. I did the whole Penn State thing, I did the Michael Sam coming out when he was playing in the NFL, I did the Ray Rice investigation. I’ve been involved in things that have never been talked about in sports before.”
“But because ESPN was a news network, it wasn’t just able to provide extensive and in-depth coverage of everything that happened. As ESPN had the ability to report, it also began to bring new voices to the table, including voices that had never been heard before,” Storm points out.
Storm said all of this has grown and evolved into a vibrant sports media ecosystem driven by the flywheel effect of live events, linear and streaming TV and social media. The expansion across multiple platforms (Corn and Storm also now host a fan-focused podcast) has naturally opened up more opportunities for women.
“It’s great to see so many great female announcers getting opportunities that they never had before,” Storm said. “It’s been a really, really, really cool evolution to see.”
(Pictured above: Hannah Storm and National Women’s Soccer League commissioner Jessica Berman appeared on “SportsCenter” in April.)