Before Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit called Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football broadcast, Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer made history at Amazon as the first all-female, full-time NFL broadcast booth.
And from the moment ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter tweeted about the booth, Storm felt a familiar hate boil up online.
Still, the sports media veteran Storm had been around the block enough times to focus on the big picture, she told Jon Lewis on the Sports Media Watch podcast this week.
“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,” Storm explained. “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.”
Storm and Kremer called the streaming-exclusive Thursday Night Football broadcast on Prime Video for four seasons. At the time, Amazon split the Thursday package with Fox.
Knowing the hate was coming allowed Storm to appreciate the opportunity more and focus on how to make the best of it.
“For me, it was very freeing,” Storm added. “The pressure I felt at Amazon calling games for all those seasons … was that I would do a good enough job and Andrea would do a good enough job that other women would get those opportunities.”
Storm ignored social media reactions to the games.
“The pressure wasn’t like, ‘oh people are going to hate me,’ or ‘people are going to call me out on social media for every mistake I make,” she told Lewis. “Because I just knew those people weren’t going to like me anyway, regardless of whether I did a good job or not.”
In the interview, Storm explained how being the first-ever NFL sideline reporter, leading a unique sports department at CNN, and being thrust into her first play-by-play role calling the first season of the WNBA all hardened her against the scrutiny and bigotry women face in sports media.
Nowadays, the legendary Storm is back at the SportsCenter desk anchoring ESPN’s signature program.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.