Hockey Night In *checks notes* the United Arab Emirates?
Kathryn Tappen, for one, will never say never to that. Granted, now isn’t the time to contemplate such a concept, but the NBC Sports, NHL Network, and TNT veteran has experienced the requisite fascination firsthand.
While pursuing a master’s degree in Global Sport at New York University during the 2025-26 academic year, Tappen went on rigorous residencies at three of NYU’s international campuses. When she shared her takeaways with Awful Announcing, she called her Abu Dhabi visit “the most eye-opening.”
NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus hosted Tappen and her cohort for their first weeklong overseas excursion. There, just like at home base in Manhattan and later in Paris and London, the scholars surveyed local venues and met with movers and shakers. Through nightly networking dinners and other gatherings, all parties involved swapped nuggets of their homeland’s existing sports scenes and eagerness to feed off each other.
“One of the things about Abu Dhabi,” she told AA, “was the desire for Western sports, the desire for what we know, our insight.”
Tappen came back pondering whether the NHL — which, so far in commissioner Gary Bettman’s 33-year run, has shared its talents with crowds in all of the sport’s established European hotbeds plus the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and Australia — could somehow share some of its brand with the UAE.
Tappen went to NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly for affirmation. But one weekend after the league’s world-class players and NBC’s top on-air talent wrapped up the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, war broke out in Iran, quickly catching the nearby Emirates in the crossfire.
“I ultimately had to pivot due to what’s happening in that region of the world,” Tappen said. But in more peaceful times, she said, Abu Dhabi “was flourishing.”
Of her NHL-UAE idea, she concluded that she “can always revisit it down the road.”
That road, among other fruits, might lead to a read.
“I could write a book about all that I learned there,” she said of Abu Dhabi.
If she does, that project will have to wait, too. Having just reupped her contract to cover college football for NBC, Tappen feels secure in sportscasting.
Still, at the dawn of this decade, she learned how one’s chosen endeavor can evaporate indefinitely because of extenuating circumstances. She was in her seventh season at the NBC Sports when COVID-19 proliferated stateside and ultimately halted that league’s 2019-20 campaign from mid-March through the end of July.
Naturally, comparable hiatuses took hold in all other sports. This wasn’t like a lockout, where any reporter could transfer their assets and energy to other levels of their preferred game or to a different game altogether. Business was barren.
Meanwhile, Tappen recalled, “I was watching other industries around me flourish.”
So she turned her consternation into “curiosity,” entertaining possibilities like law school. And while normalcy gradually returned to sportscasting before she could choose and act on anything else, alternative paths kept incubating in her mind and morphed into something additional—an extra way to apply her passions and proficiencies to grow her portfolio.
“It always mattered to me to keep that fire and curiosity alive,” she said.
Five years after the pandemic-induced spring and summer of nothing, Tappen found her extracurricular curriculum. Samantha Calabrese, a friend and former colleague from NBC’s talent department, pointed her to NYU’s School of Professional Studies. Tappen had also considered Boston University and Stanford, but after moving back to her childhood state of New Jersey — where the NHL Network is also based — and with NBC Sports headquartered in Connecticut, she chose the Big Apple in between.
It didn’t hurt that she had built a rapport with Bettman, himself an NYU Law School graduate. During the 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs, he hosted Tappen at the league’s headquarters to assess her academic goals, then wrote the only letter of recommendation she needed to apply.
By the next NHL training camp, she was juggling her coverage with her syllabus. And her incentive to study Global Sport was only amplifying.
The same month Tappen started her year at NYU, the NFL was presenting a regular-season game in Brazil for the second straight season. It later made its first foray into Ireland and Spain, then its fourth in Germany.
“Sports leagues are taking their products and their brands all over the world, and I really wanted to know why,” Tappen said.
Her Paris and London residencies yielded a chance to catch up with one country that will join the NFL International Series this fall and the one that launched it in 2007. The U.K.’s fondness for another type of football is self-explanatory and noticed by U.S. audiences through NBC’s longstanding English Premier League coverage. But after soaking in the exemplary soccer scene, Tappen and her cohorts realized that Brits crave more pigskin than just an annual live slice.
“Why does it work in all these countries where they don’t even have these sports?” she wondered.
The answer, in a nutshell, could be the allure of possibility. The coveted variety on this continent applies to the games and to the ways of getting involved either on or beyond the playing surface.
“You can do anything you want in the United States,” Tappen said, “and that doesn’t exist all around the world.”
As she wrapped up her credits, she saw her fellow Americans get a clearer sense of why other nations thirst for servings of what she calls “a worldwide leader in the sports and entertainment industry.” Over 39 days, the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup held 104 matches across 16 venues in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
As a result, passionate tourists flocked from across the pond. They brought their rituals and rooting interests to stadiums and sports bars, plus their customs and curiosity to Major League Baseball parks during their downtime from soccer.
Having already done a residency in Abu Dhabi and witnessed what she called the locals’ “wonderful spirit for wanting Western civilization and Western culture,” Tappen understood the TikTokers documenting minimarts as if they were majestic national parks.
At the same time, she had much to learn about other nations and the unique sport- and culture-based joys they exemplify. To that end, she and her NYU classmates had to select a World Cup program other than their own and produce weekly written reports on how soccer intertwined with said country’s culture and diplomacy.
Following her grandfather’s legacy, Tappen chose Spain. She embraced her first chance to follow a World Cup “from an analytics standpoint.”
Little did she know that her country of choice would ultimately trundle to the podium in her native vicinity at MetLife (or “New York New Jersey”) Stadium.
Three weeks after the FIFA festival, Tappen went to NYU’s London satellite to present her thesis, which also intersects with her Garden State roots. Having shelved the NHL-UAE proposition, she followed NYU Global Sport Associate Dean Dr. Daniel Kelly’s encouragement to dissect “Closing the NIL Gap: A Sustainable Collective Strategy for a Lower-Tier Big Ten Program.”
As an undergraduate, Tappen ran cross country and track for Rutgers University during the Scarlet Knights’ Big East days. In 2014, Rutgers transferred conferences and gave the Big Ten its first East Coast tenant.
That same year, Tappen joined NBC and started seeking scoops on Notre Dame’s football sidelines. When the network added the Big Ten to its scope in 2023, she started reporting on her alma mater and its gridiron peers as well.
This past April, she added a seat on the first-ever Scarlet Knight Enterprises board of directors to her pursuits. In its press release introducing the seven directors, the organization explained its aim “to create strategic partnerships that elevate brand visibility and produce revenue growth. By combining multimedia rights, marketing and NIL opportunities, the organization connects student-athletes and partners through innovative content, premium experiences and expanded engagement across digital, broadcast and live-event platforms.
“The media and media attention on each team is a huge part of growing these programs,” Tappen said. Singling out sponsorship and its growing range of methods as “the single-biggest driver,” she left off with a reporter-like mission statement.
“Just to try and get an understanding of everybody’s perspective.”
Listening to active Scarlet Knight athletes and other Big Ten students also lets Tappen follow an incentive to return to her roots. She takes time to connect with college students and high schoolers interested in announcing and other sports-oriented careers.
Locally, she wants those in her former shoes to be aware and prepared to access the oases of opportunity. Globally, she wants to see those avenues emerge elsewhere.
“We’ve kind of maxed out,” she says of the North American sports scene and all of its trimmings, “whereas there is so much opportunity (for growth) around the world.”
