National Women’s History Month: Evolution of Women in Sports Journalism, locally and nationally

By Sally Tippett Rains

March is National Women’s History Month– the month to spread awareness of how far women have come and how far they can continue going. Some of the words associated with National Women’s Month are empowerment, resilience, achievement, and equality.

In the 1970’s — the birth of women in sports journalism– there was a famous slogan from the Virginia Slim’s cigarette company: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Well years later and cigarettes are not even allowed on televised advertisements, but women in sports writing or sports reporting have definitely come a long way.

International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8, 2025, and we thought it would be fun to look back to the early days of women working in sports broadcasting or sports writing. Women began to infiltrate the sports world around the 1970’s, early ’80’s with a few things happening before that.  Jane Chastain, Donna De Varona and Jeannie Morris are early pioneers of women in sportscasting.

Phyllis George who was known for being Miss America 1971 started working for CBS as a sportscaster in 1974.

Jane Kennedy Overton, also a former beauty queen– Miss Ohio USA– was another one of the first women to make it big in the male-dominated sports world in 1978 when she got a role on NFL Today. Robin Roberts who is now on Good Morning America got her start in 1983 as a sports anchor for WDAM-TV in Hattiesburg Mississippi before moving to ESPN’s SportsCenter in 1990.

Baseball is a perfect genre to celebrate the changes that history has brought women.  Those of a certain age will remember, the 1970’s, ’80’s ’90’s brought out many “firsts” for women in the area of sports and  for this purpose, specifically baseball.

During those years, being a woman in sports was a non-traditional career choice and many of the male athletes or sportswriters did not want to see women “invading their territory.” In the early days of women in sports, women were hung up on and not given interview opportunities otherwise available to their male counterparts. Some women sued for equal access and wound up as headlines in news stories themselves, but most just did their jobs– wanting to pursue sports writing or sportscasting as a career merely because they liked sports. In the early days they were not just “sports reporter” but always referred to as “female sports reporters.”

This reporter was proud to work in the sports department at KMOX Radio,  in the late 1970’s, early ’80’s–one of maybe four female sports reporters in St. Louis at the time. Nancy Drew was a pioneer in sports broadcasting at KMOX Radio in the late 1970’s and ’80’s.  She left St. Louis in 1988 to move with her husband Cardinals Hall-of-Famer Larry Wilson when the Cardinals moved to Phoenix to become the Arizona Cardinals.

The Post-Dispatch had at least three female reporters at the time, Kathy Nelson, Marcia Sanguinette and Cathy Burnes Beebe.

When women first entered the field of sports writing, the sports teams were tasked with figuring out what to do with them.

The Football Cardinals (as they were called when they were in St. Louis so as not to confuse them with the baseball team) tried an “interview room” where all the sports writers had equal access. There were several male reporters who did not like this arrangement and it was conveyed to the women who were just trying to do their jobs.

KMOX Radio, under CBS Regional Vice-President Robert Hyland was very open-minded when it came to hiring women in the Sports Department.

Lisa Bedian  worked at KMOX Radio from 1981-1984, producing several of the Football Cardinals games at KMOX and is one of the few women to have produced an NFL game broadcast.

“My colleagues at KMOX Radio– Jack Buck, Mike Shannon, Bill Wilkerson, Bob Costas, Dan Dierdorf, Bob Burnes, Dan Kelly, Gus Kyle and others –were fantastic and helped me learn so much that I still carry with me today.  Other local reporters (some of whom became lifelong friends) were also very accepting including George Csolak, Randy Liebler, John Ulett and others.”

Back then, if a female wanted to be a sports reporter or have a respectable job in sports media, they had to work extra hard to be accepted.

“Hopefully it’s a lot better for women in sports journalism than it was back then when we were breaking glass ceilings,” said Bedian.  “Some of my male colleagues wouldn’t even recognize my existence in the press box.  I kept saying hello to them anyway, just to remind them I wasn’t going anywhere.  Another challenge happened when an engineer was caught sabotaging my work recording prior to air.  He was demoted.”

And there was the article the Post-Dispatch wrote demeaning women sports reporters, going so far as to accuse one reporter of seeing a certain player in just a towel, when in reality none of the local female sports reporters even went into the male sports locker rooms. They did, however go into the St. Louis Streak, women’s basketball team’s locker room.

There were those who were making national headlines for wanting to be in the locker rooms for equal access, but women mostly just wanted to do their jobs.

“During my sports career, I tried to do my interviews outside the locker room to show respect for the players if I could meet my deadlines,” said Bedian. “Usually this worked out well.”

Emphasis on “usually.” There were some nights the lights in the stadium halls had been turned out and a lone female reporter was waiting outside the locker room in that dark hall for a player to come out so they could get a “quick comment” on the game. A fully dressed player, with wet hair from the shower, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other sauntered out, which of course showed complete disrespect to the reporter whose male colleagues were back in the press box, already half-way through their articles.

There were funny stories and just plain mean stories. One funny story happened to Lisa Bedian when she covered the Blues and the Plager brothers were eencouraging her to go through a pair of double doors into the part of the locker room complex where women were allowed. She had no interest in being in the locker room per se, she just wanted to get her interviews to get back to the station.

“One night after a game, Barclay and Bobby Plager decided to play a joke on me,” she remembers. “I was waiting to do an interview outside the double doors and Barclay grabbed me by one elbow and Bobby grabbed me by the other and they opened the door, lifted me up, and kind of tossed me into the room.

“I got an eye-full—of an empty room with a couple of exercise bikes and no naked players, thankfully.  It was merely a warm-up space and the door to the left was the coach’s office where Jacques Demers and Ron Caron would hold court after the games.  They all had a good laugh at my shocked face, and after that, I interviewed the players and coaches inside the previously intimidating double doors.”

The Blues seemed not to make a distinction between the competency of male vs. female as their long-time public relations director  and eventually vice-president, was Susie Mathieu who was excellent at what she did and definitely the best “man ” for the job. She was professional and treated everyone– male or female with respect. Mathieu was honored with the first ever True Blue Award at the 2024 Blues Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. (Photo courtesy NHL)

“Susie Mathieu was the first woman to be the Director and/or Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations for an NHL team  and also an NFL team and I became very close and have been friends for more than 40 years,” said Bedian.

The baseball Cardinals, who even brought in a female assistant public relations director for a time– Robin Monsky– would do their best to help the female sports reporters. Monsky worked for the Cardinals from 1981-1986.

As with all change, it appeared to be tough on some of the players at the start. At first, players like Carl Yasztremski would hang up on a female trying to interview him. At KMOX Radio if you were hung up on, your bosses would tell you to call them back and keep calling them util you got the interview. Same with in-person interviews. This helped those who worked there to develop a “never-give-up” attitude. There was no letting an obstacle get in your way at KMOX under the Hyland mentality. He and those who worked under him required an attitude of excellence.

“There were lots of stories that were good and some that were tough,” said Bedian who went on to KMOV TV (which was KMOX TV at the time and then to the CBS Network where she was a sports producer for the network. “I tried to learn something from all of them. The challenges taught me to work harder and make sure I got things right because I learned that if I made a mistake there were some that would chalk it up to me being a woman, and I just couldn’t let that happen. ”

Women would be turned down for interviews or kept waiting in the halls outside the locker rooms for hours after the games were over. One female reporter was even locked in a room by a well-known Spanish-speaking player who acted like he didn’t understand that she was asking for directions to the field. Turns out she spoke Spanish and realized he was just pulling a fast one on her, but she had to wait for another player to come by and hear her banging on the door to be let out and continue on to her on-field interviews.

From the beginning,  most females were very consciences both in their dress and their demeanor of trying to fit in and not be the center of attention. There was no social media back then, so fans did not know or care about their personal lives.

As she moved to New York City for the sports producer job at CBS, Bedian realized she was the only woman at that time who had the sports producer title at the CBS network.

“I soon discovered my ‘unique’ status,'” she said. “And unfortunately, I also figured out why other women were not working as sports producers there at that time.  The environment was very challenging and sometimes demeaning.”

In recent years, Jen Langosh covered the Cardinals for MLB.com, where she is now an editor, and Katie Woo is the team’s beat writer for the Athletic. Several local television sports anchors or radio show hosts are also female. Alexa Datt plays a large role in the  in-studio portion of the Cardinals broadcasts and this year she becomes the first female to do play-by-play for the Cardinals.

Viewers today are used to seeing females in sports jobs, something any young girl can imagine and aspire to as a career due to the many ground-breaking achievements of the early women journalists. And seeing women in the sports arena made it more common to see them taking front office jobs with teams.

The Cardinals celebrated “National Women and Girls in Sports Day” by posting the names of the women who work there on social media: “On National Girls and Women in Sports Day, we celebrate the incredible women in our front office and throughout the sports industry.”

Many of the  females who paved the way for today’s women in sports were recognizable names such as the ones listed here or in the timeline below, but there the many behind-the-scenes writers and producers who quietly did their jobs enabling sports writing, reporting or marketing to become a career goal for young girls.

Many have served as mentors and examples to young aspiring journalists. Many of the women working in sports today stand on the shoulders of the early pioneers.

Lisa Bedian sums it up:

“During my time as a sports reporter, I was imparted the wisdom from others that I was expected to ‘pay it forward’ and I’ve always tried to do that with colleagues, interns and people I’ve mentored throughout my career.”

Here is a brief timeline for women in sports journalism

1963- Jane Chastain, first female sports broadcasters who made football predictions in Atlanta for WAGA-TV.

1975- Phyllis George named a co-host for “The NFL Today.”

1978- Jane Kennedy replaces Phyllis George on “The NFL Today.”

1990- Lesley Visser becomes the first woman to cover the World Series

1993 -Gayle Gardner becomes the first woman to do televised play-by-play of baseball. She called a game between the Rockies and the Reds that year.

1993- Andrea Joyce first woman to co-host network television coverage of the World Series.

1995- Hannah Storm gets two “firsts”– First woman to serve as solo host of a World Series game and first woman to preside over World Series trophy presentation.

2009- Suzyn Waldman first woman to work a World Series game from the booth.

Sign up for our free newsletter and get the latest Cardinals coverage every week: CLICK HERE.