Women’s sports enjoyed a landmark year in 2024, and the future looks bright. One of the people trying to shine more light on these athletes and the games they play is Sarah Spain. The longtime journalist and broadcaster is best known for her work with ESPN, including Around the Horn and espnW.
Last summer, she launched a daily women’s sports podcast with iHeartRadio and Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment called Good Game with Sarah Spain.
We recently caught up with Spain to discuss Good Game and other topics. She has a book coming out in June titled Runs in the Family: An Incredible True Story of Football, Fatherhood, and Belonging, which is based on a 2018 ESPN story she wrote about then-Kansas City Chiefs running backs coach Deland McCullough who is now with Notre Dame. Runs in the Family is available for preorder at Amazon.
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Awful Announcing: Why should someone check out the Good Game podcast?
Sarah Spain: “It is the only daily women’s sports podcast giving you both news on the sports happening right now and information about the leagues starting this year, interviews with athletes, coaches, and journalists. I think the biggest difference between Good Game and the other coverage of women’s sports is our aim is to provide the connective tissue between the major events and games in the same way we have always covered men’s sports. Mainstream coverage for women’s sports often focuses solely on maybe the start of a season and then checking back in for the championship. Potentially when there’s a big performance, a major news story, or a crime, right? Something salacious. But (most of the mainstream media doesn’t) provide people with the information necessary to bring them back for that next game to learn about the players and care about what they’re doing.”
Your podcast opened 2025 with the theme ‘New Year, New Leagues.’ What was the thinking behind that?
“We just thought 2025 was going to be pretty incredible in terms of the number of new professional leagues. LOVB Pro Volleyball has been five years in the making. We’ve heard so much about the lead-up to it. Unrivaled, there’s been such a great, creative, interesting rollout. So when I’m getting excited about a new league, part of what I want is as much information as possible. Who’s playing in it? When do they start? Where are the games? How can I watch all that stuff? We thought it’d be good to start the year with capsule episodes about each of those brand new leagues.”
Is there one particular new league that fascinates you?
“I would say Unrivaled is the most fascinating to me. I think they’ve done an incredible job of making the rollout and announcement of every player an event. They did creative teases and hints to get fans to guess who the next name would be. They did interesting and cool rollouts for the names of the teams and the logos and their recent media day coverage, both the facility down in Miami and the photos. They’re just doing it right. And for a league that could have easily said, ‘Hey, we’re doing an eight-week 3-on-3 league in Miami’ and not gotten the same excitement for it, instead, they’ve turned it into a destination that the best players in the world want to play in and something that fans are super excited about and something that brands are super into.”
LOVB volleyball is installment #2 of our “New Year, New Leagues” series! President Rosie Spaulding & Salt Lake City player Jordyn Poulter share how the league is prioritizing athlete experience & why commentary will sound a little different. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/g…
— Sarah Spain (@sarahspain.com) January 7, 2025 at 10:18 AM
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You interviewed the founder of The Sports Bra, a famous women’s sports bar in Portland, Oregon. Could you tell us a little more about that experience?
“I had met Jenny Nguyen a couple of times. I had heard her story and it’s amazing how it has spread, the number of people who forwarded me stories about her making over a million dollars in her first year running the bar. This concept seems simple and revolutionary, and how she made it work so quickly. I think it speaks to the desire for women’s sports, and for spaces that feel welcoming for women’s sports fans.
“I think what stood out to me in part was Jenny being a first-generation immigrant, and kind of fitting a lot of the stereotypes of the daughter of parents who have big expectations in the traditional fields of, you know, doctor, lawyer. Instead, (she went) to culinary school. She toured the bar space with her parents before she opened it. Her father was so disappointed and thought she had thrown it all away. Instead, it has brought them closer together, and they’ve never been prouder.”
Where do women’s sports go from here?
“One of the things we try to do on Good Game is to give context to the moment that we’re in and to the things that are happening and the records being broken. When we talk about ‘this is the highest rating since 1995’ or something, we’ll say, ‘What was happening in 1995 that they got even higher ratings?’ How do we go back and understand why they dropped after that? That could be something like the WNBA, where we’ve talked about how an executive, with intention, tried to bury it onto side channels on ESPN instead of the major network. And what a big drop that caused in viewership and awareness. When we look at records that are being broken, we like to look at whether the length of the seasons has changed. Whether the stats and rules have changed, right? Just providing context makes it much more interesting to understand what’s happening now.”
What do you think about Around the Horn reportedly ending later this year?
“I haven’t been on Around the Horn in a year-and-a-half or two years. There was a no-longer-at-the-company executive who didn’t want me to appear on it anymore for reasons never expressed to anyone. But I am very bummed about the show. I think it is unique. I think it’s really smart, really funny. I think it’s different than what’s out there. And it allows for a variety of voices and perspectives. It allows for a ton of different stories and some of the things that aren’t covered everywhere else. Yeah, I think it’s a real bummer and a really dumb move to cancel it.”
Do you have a favorite memory from Around the Horn?
“I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. That was my dream job my whole life and still is. The Halloween episodes always gave me a chance to flex that muscle. When I was Moira Rose, I took the time to learn the accent. My makeup artist found the makeup artist from Schitt’s Creek to make me look the most like her. The feedback I got was very rewarding. It was fun.”
As a longtime Chicagoan, do you know why Chicago sports have been so lousy lately?
“Oh, for the love of God. I don’t even know. In recent years, we’ve been able to at least hold up the Red Stars and the Sky as outliers, but they didn’t have good seasons either. One of the things I love the most about Chicago is it is a giant city full of incredible culture and restaurants. You can get all the big city things, but we operate in a way that isn’t like a big city.
“The problem is when our sports teams try to operate like small-town teams. We have budgets. We have facilities. We have all the things that should warrant having (good) teams and spending on par with all the biggest places in our country. Instead, we constantly operate like we’re a small town. It’s so frustrating.”
Have you mended fences with Christine Brennan?
“I don’t know, to be honest with you, if there were fences that needed to be mended. I went into that interview hoping to just have an honest and open conversation and to see if she was intentional in some of the outcomes that she had or if maybe her intentions weren’t matching her outcomes and she just wasn’t aware of it. And I left feeling kind of frustrated and pretty sad actually because she’s done so much in the space. It felt like she was either unaware or unwilling to see how some of her coverage was negatively impacting the athletes and to couch it as ‘just journalism’ instead of understanding how some of the questions were bad faith was tough.”
YMI: catch an encore presentation of this morning’s E:60, featuring Declan Sullivan’s enduring legacy, and our UNREAL NFL story on @Chiefs RB coach @coachdmc, 12p on ESPN News. Set those DVRs. pic.twitter.com/9esEgZ33QQ
— E60 (@E60) September 2, 2018
Why should someone buy Runs in the Family, which you co-wrote with Deland McCullough?
“It’s an unbelievable story. If someone told it to you and you didn’t know it was true, you would say, I don’t believe it. That’s a made-for-Disney kind of movie. The story has been picked up and shared everywhere, from TikTok influencers to it being a page in the books that people read in church. The book not only tells the story of his life and this unbelievable discovery but gets into understanding nature versus nurture, ending cycles of trauma, what you learn from the place in which you were raised, what you earn from your genetic makeup, and how you become the person that you are via choices in addition to the mentorship and leadership around you.”
