ESPN’s Hannah Storm made history with Andrea Kremer from 2018-2021 as the first all-female broadcast booth. The two veteran sportscasters called Thursday night NFL games for an Amazon Prime Video alternate feed before the streaming giant gained exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football.
Storm talked to Jon Lewis on the Sports Media Watch Podcast this week, where she reflected on her experiences calling TNF action. As a woman working in sports media and doing something that had never been done before, Hannah said she knew she had to have thick skin and just tune the negativity out.
“There was probably an equal measure of some people were really excited because it was obviously a piece of history, but then there were also people who were kind of, ‘stay in the kitchen’ and much worse,” she said. “So it was actually freeing to me because I knew there were going to be people, and I’ve always known this, that are bigoted and are hateful or just plain ignorant. And they’re just not going to like you anyway, so you could go on and do the best job possible and it would never actually change their mind, because they think that you don’t belong there.”
When asked if she felt any added pressure to set the standard for future female NFL broadcasters, Hannah Storm explained that knowing that the opinions of naysayers on social media were meaningless allowed her to focus on working with Andrea to do the best show possible.
“The pressure that I felt at Amazon for calling games for all those seasons — we called full seasons for four years — was that I would do a good enough job and that Andrea would do a good enough job that other women would get those opportunities,” she said. “That was the pressure for me.”
“The pressure wasn’t like, ‘People are gonna hate me or call me out on social media for every mistake I make,’ because I just knew that those people weren’t gonna like me anyway regardless of if I did a good job or not,” Storm added.
