If you have worked in sports media for any part of the last four decades, chances are you have dealt with Mike Soltys. He is the second-longest tenured employee at ESPN. The VP of Corporate Communications learned in May that he had been laid off after 43 years with the network.
“I started senior year at UConn, so my entire adult life has been here in Bristol,” he told Dennis House on WTNH-TV’s This Week in Connecticut on Sunday.
The local news magazine show did a feature on Soltys and the ongoing layoffs at ESPN and its parent company, Disney.
House told the audience that Soltys had been integral to the show and other media outlets being able to work with ESPN over the years. Soltys joked that he had so many contacts that the morning news broke that he was being let go, he was in a bit of an awkward position.
“The morning that my round of layoffs was announced, I heard from all sorts of media looking for comment because that’s who they’ve called during previous rounds of layoffs and I got to send them to some of my colleagues. So that was particularly awkward.”
Despite the recent moves and ongoing challenges to the media industry, Mike Soltys has nothing bad to say about ESPN. He says the network will be just fine without him.
“I think the future still is bright for ESPN,” he said. “It still goes back to that basic premise that we’re providing sports all the time and people are still looking for sports all the time. Where there’s a streaming universe and everything else, we’ve shown it that we can do multiple cable channels, we can do broadcast, we can do streaming, we can do social. You know? We can do all that. So I think that the future still is bright.”
He added that his job has put him in some truly enviable positions. He has attended World Cup openers, visited the White House, and led every Connecticut governor since Lowell Weicker on tours of the network’s Bristol campus.
“I feel that I’ve, every year, had more experiences than a lot of people get in a lifetime.”
