Sarah Spain: The Rise of Women's Sports

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
I've wanted to have Sarah Spain on the show since 2020 I loved her podcast, that's what she said, which featured a number of broadcasters, writers and well, anything she was curious about. You likely know her from ESPN, where she's appeared on shows like around the horn. So there are two things I've set out to accomplish on this show today, and that's talk about Sarah's amazing broadcast career, and talk about the big opportunity in broadcasting right now, and that's women's sports. She's also going to talk about the truths and myths behind women's sports and its growing popularity. And now Sarah Spain joins me from Chicago. Tell me about how you got to Cornell University. I

Sarah Spain  0:57  
was a three sport athlete in high school and knew I wanted to keep playing sports in college, and knew I wanted to go to the best school I could get to, but also preferred to be small fish in a big pond instead of the opposite. So a lot of the division three schools I was looking at, I knew I would be able to play sports, but I really wanted to challenge myself at the division one level, and so I applied to 11 or 12 schools. My number one was Dartmouth, and went on a recruiting trip. There it was okay. They do a lot of like sitting in rooms and drinking and it's cold, and at Cornell, there's 43 fraternities. So even though I wasn't in a sorority and into Greek life, it did mean that there were big fun parties with different themes and things like that. And I didn't drink till I was a junior in college. So I wanted to go somewhere that somewhere that had a good social life, where you could have a good time without just sitting and staring at each other over beers. So I didn't get into Dartmouth at the last minute. The coach called and said, Oh, we can only pull so many strings for a couple people on the team. And you know, maybe you could transfer blah, blah, blah. And then once I got to Cornell, I just loved it so much, and it was such a good fit for me. So yeah, it was a combination of sports and wanting to go to the best academic school

Matt Cundill  2:04  
I could find. And it was heptathlon. That was your event. Can you name them? Well, I cheated, very few. Can you looked it up? I cheated? Well, I'll tell you what I was thinking is, so women get a heptathlon that seven, but men get 10, so which is 70%

Sarah Spain  2:23  
Yeah, some are arguing that women should do the decathlon as well. I, for 1am, grateful that that wasn't the case during my time, because pole vault is a part of it, and that is such a very difficult and specific event. In terms of one of my good friends in high school, was a pole vaulter in college and the Olympics, and she was an all state gymnast and hurdler, so she had the speed, but also that, like body weight and control and all this other stuff. And that would have been a tough one for a six foot lady, which is what I am. So

Matt Cundill  2:49  
you would also, I guess the other two that are missing. I'm seeing 1500 meters is not there. Oof, no. Thank you, yeah, bad enough with the 800 and there's one other one I'm missing discus, which

Sarah Spain  3:01  
I would have loved. I don't need to run farther than at 800 and that was bad enough at the end of the heptathlon, so 1500 No, thank you.

Matt Cundill  3:08  
Which one of those events was the one that you would slam dunk.

Sarah Spain  3:11  
Javelin ended up being my best Javelin hurdles, long jump. Javelin did not exist in Illinois state track and field, and so my coach actually borrowed one from a nearby college to help me practice and learn so that I could compete in some of the local feeders to the Junior Olympics and national championship stuff at the youth level. And as soon as I tried it, it was immediately my thing.

Matt Cundill  3:33  
I was six years old, and I saw the javelin and pole vault events of the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. So fun. Yeah, it's very random. Whatever

Sarah Spain  3:45  
people ask, like, What do you miss? I'm like, actually miss javelin, because there's no opportunity to, like, play pick up javelin. You're not gonna, like, go to a neighborhood park and throw it around.

Matt Cundill  3:55  
So I'm from Montreal originally, so I would have a little bit of knowledge about Cornell, because it's close by. And I actually wanted to know from you, when people talk about Cornell sports, what's the most famous of all the athletes who played their alumni?

Sarah Spain  4:11  
One of the biggest is Ken Dryden, really famous hockey goalie and a brilliant guy too. So really nice one to look up to. Ed Marinaro. He was an actual Heisman Trophy nominee back when Cornell was still a part of the teams that could, you know, get those kind of awards, and he went on to be a famous actor on sisters and other shows. So here's one that people know, of course, I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the most famous ones. Those kind of stick out to me as, like, way back when, more so than some of the recent folks who have been Olympians and things

Matt Cundill  4:41  
like that. I'll throw in Joey new and dyke, yeah, I had to look that up and Jessica Campbell. I had to look that one up too. I was saying, if I asked Sarah this, there's no way she'll say Ken Dryden first. But she did.

Sarah Spain  4:57  
I'm full of surprises. I.

Matt Cundill  5:00  
For our audience, a largely Canadian audience, what is Title Nine? Title

Sarah Spain  5:05  
Nine is an education lawsuit that prohibits anyone, as a result of gender from being limited in the opportunities that they have at federally funded educational institutions. So that's K through 12 and college. Oftentimes it's mistaken for a sports bill, because that's where so much of the impact has been felt, but it originally also made sure that women were allowed in classes for STEM and science and other things where they might have been prohibited, and also opened up the floodgates for more women being admitted into colleges and universities. But obviously it's been a massive piece in the US getting out ahead of other countries in terms of professional and Olympic women's sports, because there's this massive flood of girls that in the 70s suddenly had the opportunity to play. It's still terribly enforced, by the way, for those who are wondering, the 50th anniversary was just a couple years ago, and all of the celebrations mostly resulted in people investigating the terrible lack of compliance to Title Nine and how few schools and universities are actually offering the same number of opportunities, the same resources, the same education in sport as they are for boys and men. How

Matt Cundill  6:05  
come every college goes to well, if we put in Title Nine, we lose our football program,

Sarah Spain  6:10  
because it's an easy way to demonize the people that are being left out, as opposed to recognizing that the people who are already included are being treated better and differently. Football is a tough one. There are so many spots on a football team that in order to provide an equal number of roster spots, you have to introduce some sports on the women's side. And then people think that it's unfair that there is no men's version of whatever sport is on the women's side, ignoring, of course, the fact that the football team provides all these opportunities. What we found during that title nine anniversary, some of the research other people did that I read was really fascinating with some of the tricky ways that schools get around reporting. One of them is male practice players. Count towards women when you're reporting for Title Nine, if men are helping the women's team prep by being practice players, they'll count them as women. Doesn't make any sense, and things like rowing, they will have listed over 100 participants on a college crew team, none of whom, not none, only a small number of whom are actually in practice or competing. But once they can list them, they can use those numbers to try to offset the actual numbers of men that are competing. So there's a lot of tricks, or they can say that they offered something up and there wasn't enough interest, and therefore they checked off one of the three possible ways to be in compliance, which is that we tried, but no one cared. And that means we put up a piece of paper on a bulletin board that said, Does anyone want to play women's whatever? And no one showed up. So that's that's it. We did it. So it's just terribly enforced right now. The only way to enforce is to literally sue your school or threaten to sue there. Otherwise isn't. Department of Education is in charge of compliance, but they have to be brought so they have to be brought to them. They are actively going out and trying to look into it.

Matt Cundill  7:49  
You graduated, or at least got into the workforce at a fairly interesting time, sort of in the early 2000s but I want to ask you about your time at the Jim Henson Company, where you were an intern, and then I think the subsequent job that you did after that also had to do with communication. So between those two jobs, what did you learn

Sarah Spain  8:07  
that I didn't want to be in PR was the number one thing. I actually didn't want to be in sports in college, I wanted to do acting and comedy. My dream was always second city and Saturday Night Live. But because I was a three sport athlete in high school, all the plays are at the exact same time. Even in college, you know, we started practice for track in the fall. We competed in the winter and the spring, I only ended up trying to audition for one play at Cornell. And I would have given up my indoor season that year, but it was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There were like three parts, so a senior who's not in the drama department is not getting the starring role. So that's what I wanted to do. So in an effort to convince myself to do something creative and adjacent and not pursue an impossible path of acting in comedy, I decided maybe PR, marketing, advertising, some of the creative communication side will scratch the itch of getting to learn about things and dive deep and understand them. Just what has found so fascinating about acting and comedy was inhabiting all these characters and learning about their lives, whatever. So the Jim Henson Company was very cool. It's on the old Charlie Chaplin lot in LA and Paul McCartney was recording at the recording studio, and Chris Isaac, and so I would see them occasionally. And the end of summer, party was wild. There was like an ice luge in the shape of, like, Miss Piggy that you took shots at. I mean, it was just like a wild fun and it was right in the middle of Hollywood, but I didn't want to spend my life promoting somebody else's creative accomplishments or dream and so that. And then I worked at inner sport, which at least was a nice little bridge to understanding the sports industry. But even when I was there, my brain still wasn't like, oh, I want to work in sports. It still was dead set. I'm moving to LA and trying to do the acting thing. So I guess what I learned is where I wanted to focus my energy and my efforts, yeah, towards

Matt Cundill  9:53  
yourself. And I think this creativity that pops out of you in 2007 i. And you and the girls want to get together and go to the Super Bowl, and I think some of your friends bailed on you, and did you auction yourself off to go to the Super Bowl with someone?

Sarah Spain  10:12  
Yeah, it's kind of a it's kind of a long story. I'll try to make it quick. It's very often misinterpreted or with intention, made salacious in a way that it wasn't. But, yeah, my Chicago Bears, they weren't even done with the game yet, but they were about to win and make it to the Super Bowl. And my friends in LA that were Chicago fans were like, Let's all go. So I bought a plane ticket. This is 2007 when, like, it's a lot harder to swap and get your money back or get a refund. So now I'm in the tank for that flight. A friend of mine from Cornell says they live near Miami, and I can stay there. And my god, guys, we're going. And then one said, Oh, I think I'm going to stay in LA once. I'm actually going to fly back to Chicago and be, you know, watch, with my family. Another said, I can't afford it, so now I'm like, Okay, I'm by myself. I'm going to fly down there. And then I start looking at tickets, and I'm thinking, because I'm poor, poor. Just moved to LA, make no money. I'm thinking, this will be an expensive ticket of about $500 which I don't have no more, like $5,000 if you've ever gone looking for a Super Bowl ticket. So I realized there's no way I can afford it. I'm talking to my boss at Fox Sports, not one of my bosses, and I'm like, Hey, are we covering the game? Do we have any need to send anyone like, no talking to someone else in that same room. And he's like, I told them, you know, screech from Saved by the Bell. This is the literal origin story. Had put his house on. He made a website telling people his house was going to get foreclosed on, and would people be willing to send him some money to help, and he would send them, like a signed shirt or something. And I was like, I wish I could be like, screech, where I just, like, put something on the internet. I was like, I really want to go to the game. Well, everyone give me $1 and I was like, but I don't have search engine optimization for how people would find it. Nobody knows who I am. Nobody cares about me. Why do they care if I go and this guy worked with George said, why don't you go on eBay? I was like, hmm. Like thinking. He was thinking, go on eBay and try to search for tickets or put up something. And I was like, I dressed as a Chicago bearish cheerleader for Halloween that year, my best friend was a tiny, little blonde, so she was a football player and I was the cheerleader. Haha, that's the bit. And I had written a Chicago Bears Super Bowl shuffle poem for one of the big sports blogs, which back in the day, for those who weren't around that time, it was the wild, wild west of misogyny on sports blogs, if you wanted to read them, you had to accept that it was going to be a lot of hot chicks along with your sports and a lot of misogyny, but I had written this new version of the Super Bowl shuffle for the bears and attached my photo as the bears cheerleader, and said, This is a huge Bears fan. Will you like post my poem that I wrote, and the way the internet responded to me, I was like, Oh, the internet thinks I'm cute. Like, that's nice. You know, I'm always trying to make people laugh, much more so than trying to be cute. I'm very tall, I'm very sarcastic. I'm not used to like being a girly girl and whatever. And the response was both jarring and kind of nice. I'm like, oh, maybe if I take the photo from the Super Bowl or from the Halloween outfit and I post on eBay, I'll be your date to the Super Bowl, but then there's no purchase amount, there's no bye, bye date. I just take that and I send it to a bunch of newspapers and radio outlets, and I say, Look at this crazy girl. Somebody should send her, because at the time, things weren't really going viral yet. But you could see there was like, a woman who had sold ad space on her pregnant belly for an ad, and then she'd go to the game and they'd show her, you know, with her pregnant belly, with an ad for whatever, you know, phone company was on there. It's like, Oh, I could do something like that. So I posted it. I sent it to about five stations in Chicago, five in LA, a couple websites. Went to bed, woke up, and I had over, like, 1500 emails. And I was like, Oh, what have I done? And it had gotten to the New York Stock Exchange, Instant Messenger, and all the guys were, oh, someone take the scrolls of the game. And it had gotten to Chicago, and I started getting all these emails, and I started going on the radio stations and talking about it and trying to explain, I'm such a huge fan of football, this is not like salacious. This isn't I'm an escort. I'm not a hooker. I want to go to the game. I'll sit on a popcorn cart in the back, and all I hear is how corporations will send people that don't even want to be there to glad hand like maybe I could go instead, and then AX body spray. The agency that worked with them reached out and said, We think that this is great. We are always saying AX gets guys the girl, so we want you to flip it, and you get to pick a guy from any of them that submit and take him to the Super Bowl and show that a guy would do the exact same thing. They would put themselves out there. They would talk about why they love the team in order to get picked. And it's really it's really just about you being a big fan. So found a guy picked him. Told AX, I need to bring two of my girlfriends, though. I don't want to go with the guy alone, and they'll be sad if I don't take them. So I ended up getting four tickets, flights, credit card, car service, hotel room. I got a free trip. And then they ended up getting runner up for campaign of the year for ad equivalency, for the amount that they spent, which was maybe $18,000 for over $2 million of placement in a variety of different magazines and spaces talking about the campaign, and I also did all those interviews. Kept the information for all the program directors and hosts I spoke with, so that I could follow up with them later and tell them I wanted to work in the business, and I'm not a bimbo escort. I'm just. A big fan who thought I could think of a creative way to get there. And some people still, all these years later, will come in, aren't you with no hooker who did this? I'm like, no you could see it that way if you want. It was just a big fan trying to think of a creative way to get somewhere she couldn't afford.

Matt Cundill  15:13  
I mean, it's incredible, because there, you know how many radio stations there are in America, and every one of them sits around all day trying to think something like that up in order to win the next ratings book. And you know, sometimes it's it really just takes a press release and you put it out there and kaboom, you're off and running a press release and a website generally, and you're good to go.

Sarah Spain  15:36  
Yeah, you need some sort of tangible thing to go look at. And I'm fully telling you how naive I was about both the internet and the world and like, oh, they'll get it's me, though, and I'm just, like, a big sports fan that wants to go and it said, it's like, no, the world definitely thinks that you're just, you know, an easy girl, you're a gold digger. And I'm like, Oh, I didn't really think that through. I thought it was being creative and funny, and so that sucked. I mean, I mean, I guess I should have seen it coming. I certainly would. Now I'm much less naive to the world than I was at that point.

Matt Cundill  16:06  
Well, the bad thing was, the bears lost. They sure did,

Sarah Spain  16:09  
but I got to see Devin has to return the opening kickoff for the first time in Super Bowl history, and that's one of the happiest I've ever been in that exact moment before things went downhill.

Matt Cundill  16:17  
Well, what about the Prince concert in the rain, one

Sarah Spain  16:22  
of my lowest moments. I didn't want to miss any of the football games, so the only time I left was during halftime to go to the bathroom and get concessions. And my now husband, who I did not know at the time, was also at the game, and he never lets me live that down. He always talks about how the prince halftime was one of the greatest things. There's this documentary where they tell Prince, it's gonna rain, you know, we're worried about it raining for this. And he said, Can you make it rain harder? And then absolutely crushed it. And I missed the whole damn thing because I was too much of a football fan, the exact opposite of what everyone was saying about me on the internet.

Matt Cundill  16:53  
Can see you there? Minneapolis. I'm out of here. Yeah,

Sarah Spain  16:58  
there. He's not from Chicago. No, I was a complete moron, and I missed one of the most epic Super Bowl halftimes of all time so that I wouldn't miss any of my team, which lost. And

Matt Cundill  17:06  
then you went on to work in Chicago, whether it was like, you know, WGN, some famous call winners both the TV and the radio side. You did Tribune. I mean, these are all famous Chicago names and things in places where you work. So I gotta ask about Chicago. What makes Chicago such a unique sports market?

Sarah Spain  17:26  
Yeah. I mean, I went back to Chicago to start my real sports career when I was leaving Fs one from behind the scenes and trying to do on camera, in part because it was where I grew up. So I was like, if I'm going to start and I'm a little late to the game, because I didn't know this is what I always wanted to do, I should start where I know, you know, all the bulls from the 90s and care about the teams that are there. Thing with Chicago is, and this is a tough time to ask me, because we are currently operating like a small market, despite being a giant market, all of our teams suck. None of them are spending enough. They're all enjoying the fruits of people showing up, even when they don't perform, and not doing enough to fix that. So I'm a little bit frustrated with my Men's professional teams and even the women's teams that usually get us off the hook a little in the red stars in the Chicago Sky are not did not have good seasons last year, but it is ingrained in our identity, and it is such a respite from both the weather and the sort of, I think, blue collar feel of the town. It is a massive town, but it feels so vastly different from, say, New York or LA, it is not see any. There's like, five people in Chicago who want it to be seeny and are, like, trying to go to the hot places and, like, create a culture of that. And everyone else is like, Yeah, we don't care. We just want to watch our teams go to great restaurants, absorb all the culture, be out on the lakefront, use the water, use the weather when it's nice out, if it's a nice day, half of Chicago is outside. And so when we have things to rally around that are part of who we are, which is what our sports are, you'll find very few people that will brag about the city more than Chicagoans will, like very few people love their city as much as Chicagoans love being from here and talk about being from here, and a lot of that is this dedication to our sports teams, which get us through the winter and, you know, bring us together. And we don't have the Hollywood industry like Hollywood does. We don't have the sort of melting pot, same kind of feel of New York, of international flavor, quite the same way. What we have is our own, you know, personal history.

Matt Cundill  19:19  
You've done some sideline reporting, very little. Yeah, yeah, just a little bit of Big 10 Network. Still, I want to talk about this and just what's the worst thing anybody's ever yelled at you as a sideline reporter while working there?

Sarah Spain  19:31  
Yeah, no sideline reporting. I literally did only one gig, and I wasn't very good, and I didn't get great, like, helpful feedback, so I kind of was like, Well, I guess that's not for me. Nothing, really. I'll tell you one of my biggest, not even big mistakes. But I was trying to talk about this statue that the Illini players rub on their way out onto the field, and I completely used the wrong number for how many tons it was. And literally, like a person tweeted and was like, Are you kidding me? That's that number is. Out of control. That is not what it weighs. And I looked at it, I was like, Oh, I totally said that wrong. And I was mortified. I was like, Oh, my God, I made a mistake on television. And it was such an interesting early lesson for me to be like, nobody really cares as much as you do. It's okay if you make a mistake, but also that I'm a numbers not a numbers fan. I'm a word girl. If you put words in there, they do magical things if you put numbers, and I can see the gears coming to a halt. So I try not to talk about unless I've got the numbers in front of me, or I try not to, you know, overdo it on stats, because that's just not how my brain works.

Matt Cundill  20:31  
So Erin Andrews, when she was working in Tampa, she would get yelled at and barked at from the crowd, and John Tortorella just turned to her one day and said, You got to toughen up and develop a thicker skin. And that sort of seems like, you know, asinine advice, almost like giving permission to people, to, you know, leave nasty comments and say stuff like that, yet you still gotta.

Sarah Spain  20:50  
I'd be curious if she reacted and then he said that, or if he presumed that her skin wasn't thick enough. Because an interesting thing that I found in being a connoisseur of the clap back, which I do a lot less now, because on Twitter, the people with blue checks make money if you engage with them, so they're just trolling looking for that, and a half of them are bots. And also, because I'm just older, I don't really want to waste my life engaging with people on the internet who are wanting to get into fights. But back in the day, especially when I was trying to prove a point about who I was and who women in this industry were, I would really engage intentionally with certain people in order to shout down wrong headed ideas that they were repeating, or expose people for the kind of treatment they were giving me simply for existing in a male dominated space. And the thing that I learned was that people would always tell me, you need to have a thicker skin or ignore it, and I would tell them I have a thick skin. That's why I'm still in this business. That's why I'm responding to these people. That's why I'm being an example for other women that they're not the only ones getting this. That's why I'm using these as an example to show people that you don't have to spend all day digesting garbage without ever being allowed to say anything back. And so the idea, I think, is always that the person who's the victim of the thing has to do the action instead of having a bigger and better conversation about why they are, you know, being treated the way that they are. And so the PSA that I did called more than mean was an attempt from the guy who thought of it and those of us who participated to be more visceral in the way we showed people what it feels like to have people say awful things to on the internet and sit behind their computers by having actual men have to sit unsuspectingly and read these things aloud to our faces in person, and recognize how different it feels face to face with someone to say those things. I think that video and that intention was to have people stop thinking of it as like an inevitability and realize that someone is choosing every single time to like type those things and say those things and send that vitriol.

Matt Cundill  22:42  
So for those who want to see what that's like, I've posted it on the episode page at sound off podcast.com

Sarah Spain  22:49  
Yeah, watch the language. If you're watching it in public, it's got some See you next Tuesdays.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  22:53  
Transcription of the sound off podcast is powered by the you may also like podcast, the show about people, places and things, follow the show on your favorite podcast app, or at You may also like.net

Mary Anne Ivison (Voiceover)  23:09  
this podcast supports podcasting 2.0 so feel free to send us a boost if you are listening on a new podcast app, find your new app now at podcasting two Point org, slash apps. That's podcasting two point org slash apps.

Matt Cundill  23:24  
Tell me about the time at ESPN with all the shows. We can't go over every show that you've done and worked on, but tell me about some of your favorite people that you've got to work with at ESPN or ESPN W, oh

Sarah Spain  23:35  
my gosh, so many. Jamelle Hill is my career Fairy Godmother when I would go do the ESPN W summit when I was first starting out, and I was just behind the scenes, writing and then doing updates for local radio in Chicago, coming on every 15 to 30 minutes with, you know, the clubs play the Reds tonight at 7pm and yada yada. Didn't host any shows yet. She saw me on stage very briefly doing something, and she's like, why aren't you on TV? I was like, Oh, I just haven't done enough TV. I did like a local Chicago WGN show, but they don't have enough proof of me being able to do it to give me a chance that she said, Well, the next time I'm off my show, which was at the time, called numbers never lie and eventually became his and hers, you're gonna fill in for me. And I was like, Okay, sure. And then maybe two months later, her producers call, we're flying you out to Bristol. Jamelle said you'd be great. And that was my first big TV thing. I'd done SportsCenter once. Before that one hit for the Blackhawks, it's my first time hosting. And after that, Oberman e 60 SportsCenter, all these other shows came calling. So all I needed was that proof of concept, and Jamel was the one who saw it and gave it to me and continued to open the doors for a lot of women at the company. So Jamel is one of my favorites. Dan levitard did such a great job of looking across the network and saying, who wasn't being used, right and or maybe just had a little bit of a spark and was funny and creative and different that he could bring into the wild and wacky world of the Dan levitard show based out of Miami, tons of personalities, very funny, very quick, very different from the average show. And the first couple times they had me it was to talk about things like Ray Rice or Floyd Mayweather or. Know crimes against women, serious topics, and I was good at handling those things, but I said to them, once you know everyone and your audience is going to hate me because they're gonna go Sarah's back to bring the mood down. So they decided to fly me down once to do a co hosting, which is what they would do. Sometimes they would bring someone from ESPN to fill in for the whole show and just hang out. It was such an immediate fit that I became a part of their orbit and became the Commission, the Commissioner of the grid of death, a nickname I still hang on to. And the big thing I learned from Dan, a million things I learned from Dan, but one of the biggest is he's a multi award winning, amazing radio host, writer all these things, and he was willing to admit when he didn't know things, and he was willing to let it just roll off his shoulders. Sometimes in the middle of a show, they'd be talking about some Memphis Grizzlies game, and he'd say, all right, how many people in the room know the name of the Memphis Grizzlies coach? How many people? And he would just break this fourth wall in sports, which is this belief that we need to know everything all the time, and it's not possible. And as a woman, anytime I would make a mistake, it would feel like I was letting down my entire gender, like literally, people would say this is why women shouldn't if I said or did anything wrong. Meanwhile, men could make mistakes all the time, and, oh, he just misspoke or he didn't, you know, and watching Dan be able to make a joke of it and just acknowledge we don't know, everything really freed me up to be less defensive when I made a mistake, and to be more free about trying things and not worry so much about messing up. And just the way that they interspersed humor and comedy with sports was like what I had always wanted. Always wanted to do coming out of Second City, and then I would say, Anthony, Anthony. I don't know why I called him by his proper family name. I'm not yelling at him from the kitchen. Tony reali, host of around the horn, and Josh Bard, Associate Producer. Those two guys are still close friends to this day. I loved working with them. I loved their openness to like getting women's sports into the show. Tony and I had such a rapport of being able to, like, drop a reference and the other one pick it up and keep it going and hand it back, just quick and funny and smart and thoughtful and created like a real family at that show. Julie Fauci is amazing. I mean, there's like, l Duncan is amazing. There's so many amazing people. I had some really great producers just, yeah, but those, those three, I think, kind of stand out to me. I probably

Matt Cundill  27:04  
know you best from anywhere inside that ESPN ecosystem, where I could listen on the radio whatever TSN will present to me in Canada, which is generally around the horn. And so I look at and think about the prep that goes into a show like that. So what happens before the show to get everybody to compliment one another.

Sarah Spain  27:26  
So we have a show doc that gets sent in the morning that we're supposed to sort of read on our own and go through the biggest topics of the day. And it includes stories about those things, so that if we aren't as informed as we should be, or if we want to hear some opinions on it, we can kind of get a feel for what the conversation is. What are people saying about the end of this game, or the trade of this player, or whatever? Then we hop on a call. Usually all the participants are on it, not always, but usually it's Tony and producer. Well, Tony's usually listening in the background, taking notes, not participating, but the producers will lead us through each topic. Kind of get a feel for how everybody thinks about it. Maybe even someone says something and they're like, ooh, actually, that should be a follow up. Or maybe it's really boring. And we're like, let's keep this one short, or move it into the C block or whatever, and put something else at the top. And then also, people could sometimes suggest, Hey, did you see there's this thing going on? Can we throw this in the seas? Or can we find a spot for it? Then Tony, by listening to those calls, would sort of be able to pull out and understand what people were going to say and bring what their argument might likely be, and then that way, he could tee them up and very smartly and wisely, using his understanding, which is practically encyclopedic, of what's going on in the sports world that day, make sure we got all these different perspectives, and then play people off of each other. Another fun thing about that show is you really got to know the panelists well enough to be able to say, Sarah, you know, I know you're a big fan of this. And this person talked trash about, I remember during the the World Series cubs and Indian style guardians, Bill plashke, you know, giving this rant about how the cubs were down three, one, it's over. Blah, blah, blah, the cubs are never coming back. Yada, yada yada. And so that, of course, when they did, they could Team Me Up To Play Bill's rant and have me, you know, dress him down and explain why he was wrong, and they would play us off of each other in a way that was really fun.

Matt Cundill  29:05  
That's what she said. 370 episodes, and I started this podcast so I could help broadcasters be better. I at some point probably thought to myself, we should stop this podcast and just tell everyone to listen to yours, because you had everybody on talking about the good stuff, and then episode 370 rolls around. Fittingly, it was Jamelle who was on the last episode. And I said, this show can end. I haven't had Sarah Spain on my show yet, but you got another one now. But what do you love about podcasting? Well,

Sarah Spain  29:35  
I loved That's what she said, for a million reasons. The main one was I loved working at ESPN full time, but it was a grind, and doing nightly national radio the last seven years was my own national radio show, and I did radio for 13 years daily. Pretty much you have to know everything all the time, and especially if it's nightly. That means your entire day you're keeping up with who got traded, who said what, who scored this, who's played. Playing tonight, who's playing tomorrow, and there's a part of me that was very proud of being able to do that. Particularly it mattered to me that I was the only woman that had a show every day, and I didn't want to leave and have it not be filled by another woman in some capacity. I was worried about that. It's such an old boys club National Sports Radio. But it also was really draining, and it kept me from learning and knowing other things. If you have to spend all day knowing everything about the biggest stories of the day, you can't really just think about outside the box and creative. And so my podcast was like this little outlet where it was still my job, so I wasn't taking a break or relaxing in a way that for a type a control freak, overachiever, for me, is difficult. I was still at my job, but if I wanted to read a book. I could see if that person would come on my show, and then I would read the book for my job, whether it was about sports or not. And so it really allowed me to have Saturday Night Live cast members and wine sommeliers and travel experts and neuroscientists and anyone I was curious about. I could turn it into my job to learn about them and interview them and be curious. And that was really necessary outlet for me as someone who felt kind of held in by the job of sports. You know, I was a three sport athlete. I was all state and band in chorus. I wanted to be an actor and a comedian, and so I want to do all the things I have. Taffe is literally jack of all trades, master of none. I've never wanted to specialize. And so to feel like I was just sports person, I was like, I'm missing the music and culture and all the other things that I care about. So let me find a way to get this into my work. So I love that about that podcast. And then the other big thing was getting to be curious and ask people everything I wanted about them and their lives. Offered me insight into how other people handle things, deal with things, face issues, and I had it great? I still do. I have it great in a different way. But at the time, I'm working for ESPN, it's a dream job. I'm making more money than I ever thought. I'm loving everything. I'm married with my dogs that I love, and friends and family and traveling and all these things. And I would have people on that would talk about a surprise, firing, illness, a death in the family, a major life pivot, and they would talk about how they dealt with it, and I would ask myself, How do I think I would do I have been incredibly blessed and so lucky, and so little has ever happened to me that's bad. I like to give myself credit for being optimistic and happy and successful, but also I've faced almost nothing the world has given me so few roadblocks, or at least that's how I view it. I mean, some people might say, Well, you're a woman in a male dominated field, and you get consistently sexually harassed and people treat you like shit. Isn't that a roadblock, sure, but I didn't let it stop me. So part of it is attitude, but I haven't had those main, giant traumas. And I thought, how would I react to that? Should I prepare myself if the other shoe drops? Should I start thinking about what it would look like for me if this perfect thing ends, and I was very suddenly and without warning, moved to part time at ESPN due to no longer their executive who tried to outright fire me, and then a bunch of people fought for me to stick around and kept me at the company, but it disrupted this path that I thought I was going to be on where I just kept going up and getting the things I wanted, and if I hadn't had the podcast and had those conversations with people, I think it would have really shaken me in a way that I wouldn't have been able to deal with as well, and not just the questions about neuroplasticity and happiness and dealing with triggers and redirecting your mind to see the positives and all those things, but just in general, talking to people about their lives prepared me for that moment so that I could say, Okay, how Will I choose to respond to this instead of just being overwhelmed by it? There were a million things I learned from that

Matt Cundill  33:26  
you were also minority owner of the Chicago red stars. What did you see that made you want to get involved with that? Well,

Sarah Spain  33:35  
a million things I always want to put my money where my mouth is if I'm going to be pushing for women's sports to get better coverage and more media attention and investment for most of my career, which is what I was doing at ESPN, for ESPN W alongside my other gigs, that I should be willing to stand by that myself. I wanted to learn more about the business side. I wanted to be a part of seeing that interaction between the quote, unquote, the man, which is the owners of the people in charge, and then the players who I'm usually advocating for, and I learned a ton. It was not a very positive experience. In the end, unfortunately, our minority owner was forced to sell. Our coach is literally banned. There was so much behind the scenes that we were not privy to. There was so much we should have been told before we bought in as owners that in theory, we probably could have a lawsuit about it, but nobody wants to spend our money on lawyers and drag that out. But the positive, and the way I spin it is essentially that it was a MBA class, right? It was like going, maybe not just a Class A whole, a whole couple years, you know, you go and you learn how the business side works. It gave me a lot of confidence going into spaces with people that maybe I would have otherwise thought I shouldn't be in a business kind of setting with just being a sports talent, and it has introduced me to a ton of people in the NWSL and other leagues. So now I'm part of Angel City Impact Fund and able to work with their ownership group and the folks that work over there to continue to try to, like, improve the space and make women's professional sports better from the inside, just from a different angle. Now.

Matt Cundill  34:59  
Yeah, so you talk about podcasting and the curiosity, and as you're talking about your show, I know the episodes you're talking about, like as you're as you're rattling it off, but I've always wanted to have this conversation with somebody, because I have questions about women's sports, and I don't think I could have it with anybody, but you because you've got the NBA at this so how is it possible that I can't find enough women's sports on TV when there are stations like Fox who, I mean, back in the day, they would fill it with the best damn sports show period. We've got TSN and Sportsnet in Canada that will just play the misplays of the day. And I'm like, can't we fill this better? You've got peacock and CBS has a streaming thing, and why is there not more women sports in front of my face? Well,

Sarah Spain  35:46  
say, in Canada, was it fascinating for me? So I hosted the first ESPN W summit in Toronto two years ago, and then I hosted it again last year, and I was so excited that the difference from two years ago to last year was monumental in terms of, you know, the WNBA pre season game in Toronto, and then the game, and then the team being awarded there, the NSL northern Super League. That's that's launching and starting up the PW HL, like the first time I was there, the conversation was mostly about how Canada needed to catch up and had so few professional opportunities, and really didn't understand the space the way that the US did. And then the second year it was, here's the things we've done since, and I was like progress. So for Canada, specifically, in the rights packages, I can't speak to that, but what I'll tell you about the US and just in general, is, I think the biggest problem is the people in the biggest decision making positions are using antiquated data sets. They are not putting the time and effort into understanding the economic opportunity of women's sports, and they're using subjective and dated views on what the product is and who's watching it. There are now massive data sets that are available from sports Innovation Lab, from the Tucker Center for girls and women's sports, from Wasserman from Women's Sports Foundation, that will tell you about viewing habits, purchasing habits, you know, brand affinity as a result of affiliation with women's sports. All the numbers that you need to take into those offices to convince people that it's a good investment and it's something that they should buy the rights to. And unfortunately, a lot of those people at the top are still just going to Super Bowl parties and going to NBA All Star Weekend and not going to WNBA All Star Weekend, and not taking the meetings, not making sure that their sales staff is up to date. When I was pitching stuff to ESPN, the sales team would often say, we can't sell this. And then I would tell them, I can get you six companies on the line right now that are investing in women's sports and looking to sponsor Are you talking to them? What part of this Do you not know how to sell yet? And so for me, it's the divide between the people who are in it and know it, and then the people on the outside who are not doing their due diligence and their job to know that the product is there and great. Because what we've seen so many times is these like little spurts where it breaks through despite being held back. US, women's national soccer team, you know, WNBA this year, these opportunities where, and I've done full speeches on this, to places where they don't understand that things are held back with intention, and then the product is playing. They'll say, Oh, well, this is nobody wanted to watch it. And then you'll say, Oh, well, did you know that actually, women were banned from playing professional soccer in England for like, 70 years? Oh, really? What? Oh yeah, they were drawing crowds bigger than men's soccer, and then the men's soccer was mad, so they banned women from having professional soccer for 70 years. Do you think that might hold back participation and interest and investment and growth? Right? So why do you think they are where they are today? And if you don't know the context for it, you're going to blame the product, or you're going to say, this is how it always is. If you don't understand how societal expectations about women, what they should look like, what they should wear, how they should behave, can they be competitive if you don't understand how all of those things infiltrate people's opinions on watching women's sports and don't work to change those and present them differently, or if you buy into that, like the WNBA did early on, and put all the players lying across the hood of a car in a tank top, as if that's organic to them, or what people wanted, how you set that on a wrong path immediately, like, I think that that's why you don't see it, because the people in charge are still behind. And thankfully, there are streaming opportunities, and then there's social media, which removes some of the gatekeepers that have gotten in the way. Social media is terrible, but it also means that there isn't a middle aged white straight predominantly, which is what most of them were, program director, editor, person in charge who got to decide whether we should be interested in or not, and said, Nope, we don't need that on SportsCenter. We don't need to pay the rights to that. We don't need to write a story about that. We don't need to talk about that on social media. If people want it enough, they'll find the sources for that. They'll prove that it's something people find interesting, and they'll sort of push the decision makers to cover it and to have it. So

Matt Cundill  39:36  
I was in Spain last year when the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament was taking place, and I'm going to say something, and you can tell me how I'm wrong. And that's, of course, I'm more interested in what Caitlin Clark is doing the NCAA Men's I don't know anybody. They go to the school for one year, they graduate, they move on to something else. I don't know anybody. The only thing I care. About that tournament is my bracket, which is busted on the first day. But what is going on over here with this Caitlin Clark, and what is this rivalry? And I'm gonna watch that, and it got a lot of eyeballs. Daniel,

Sarah Spain  40:11  
you're 1,000% right. The fact that it's quite clear to everyone, and especially now that the women's tournament outpaced the men's last year, there were more viewers for the Women's Championship than the men's is that it's a better product right now. There's returning players that we know. There's rivalries that are established instead of one and done on the men's side, where you know a lot of them are going to the NBA and they're just it's a stop off. You've got players you get to watch develop this year alone. You've got Hannah Hidalgo and Kiki rice and Juju Watkins and all these players that are sophomores and young players that we watch go off in their freshman year now we get to watch for three or four years get really great and build these programs. And then I think to your point, also, the NCAA always prioritized the men's in such a way that they were losing so much money. The misogyny was so deeply baked in that even somewhere like the NCAA that is all about money, failed to recognize how much of a product they had on their hands. The narrative was always that the women's tournament was a money loser. When an independent investigation found it's actually worth $80 million annually, moving towards 112 million annually, and yet they had grouped it with other packages of title games for $6 million a year and had not materially renegotiated the rights to it for 20 years. Like, if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about how women's sports are held back. Well,

Matt Cundill  41:30  
there's many different ways to count, and people will always want to count in their favor, but it

Sarah Spain  41:34  
wasn't in their favor, and that was the point, right? It was like, for them, they were like, well, we don't want to invest in that. That's not a that's not a that's not a good thing. So we'll just tell people this, but what they were doing was costing themselves 70 plus million dollars a year.

Matt Cundill  41:47  
So walk me through a little bit with US Soccer. Because here are the men who, on a bad day, won't make the World Cup, and on a good day get themselves through to the round of eight and will bow out. And the women are constantly finishing 123, often, one, and yet the money is not there. And so where's the money?

Sarah Spain  42:10  
Well, thankfully, because of equal pay and the fight that took years, and shout out to my friend Becca roo and the players who were part of it, but that was the most perfect example of how things go wrong, because it's a federation. And a lot of people, I think, have problems conflating a for profit league with a non profit Confederation or Federation. So WNBA, no one's asking for them to make the same money as the NBA. Not the same product, not the same you know, not the same company, not the same profit. They are looking for the percentage of money made to go a little bit more to the players than it is right now, but there's no argument there with soccer. It was a federation, nonprofit dedicated to the growth of boys and girls, women and men and their youth programs and adult and yet the men were flying better, eating better, having better resources, making more money for their games and sucking. So it was the perfect example to use to fight for equal pay, because regardless of outcome, they should be given the same resources, no matter who's better. But because the women were better and bringing in more money and selling more tickets and all that, it was especially egregious that they were still being treated poorly. And thankfully, now that that model exists, a lot of other countries are using it. A lot of other leagues are trying to use it. It's similar to what we talked about when we started with Title Nine. It's if you can get away with believing that boys and men are always more deserving, you'll just do that until someone catches you. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  43:33  
I had something go through my mind where it's like, okay, if you're FIFA, if you buy the men's tournament, you'd got to take the women's one two. And then I thought, no, don't do that, because, again, those sales people who don't want to sell it won't sell it.

Sarah Spain  43:46  
Well, they used to do that. This is the first time, I think they're separating the rights for the TV side, and so Netflix is in on it, and it's an investment that they are focused on, because that's what they care about. There's a really great I think Sue bird mentioned this forever ago. In talking about early days, they bundled the WNBA advertising and sponsors with NBA. It was a good idea, because they basically said, if you want NBA, you have to do some of this new league we're introducing. But a lot of the companies didn't do any research. They didn't look at different demographics. They didn't try to appeal to a different market. They just put the same thing, and then they blame the WNBA for it not working. And so the same goes for anything like, you know, FIFA or the rights to World Cups. Is you have to understand what ways the product is different in what ways the people watching are different, and then lean into that. And then you'll see which so many companies that have had great success on the women's side have, if you do the work, you get a massive payoff, because the buy in is so much less expensive now, and no one's like, oh my god, I'm so grateful to Bud Light for supporting the Super Bowl. You know, if it weren't for Bud Light, I don't know if it would happen, but people are saying, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that Michelob Ultra is a sponsor for the NWSL and keeping them going. That's what we need. I'm gonna drink Michelob Ultra. That is actually a thought process that a lot of supporters of women's sports go through. That doesn't happen on the other side, the brand affinity thing is completely different. You're

Matt Cundill  45:09  
partnered up with iHeart, and you've got one of the bigger podcasts on the network, but there's a whole lot of audio that is now coming out, and you've I mean, I love the push in the audio, especially in the podcast space, where all they do is talk about video, but tell me about the women's sports Audio Network.

Sarah Spain  45:23  
Yeah, so it's a attempt to push back at one of the biggest issues, which is inventory. There's been research for years that only 4% of media coverage in sports is for women's it is now 15% in the latest study. But one of the things the study uncovered was that, particularly when you have things like 162 baseball games for every single MLB team, the inventory that you have to air and talk about and discuss is just not there on the women's side. And so streaming platforms are helping with that, because they're not fighting for linear TV rights. We can still find them and watch them, even if they aren't beating out the NBA in terms of what a channel wants to put on, but also pre and post game shoulder programming, the kind of things that exist across the board for men's was not in existence for a lot of women's sports podcasts about the leagues and the teams and the players. And so by introducing this, it's a whole bunch of new content that allows sponsors to put money into the space, that allows fans to engage with the players, the coaches, the stories, etc. And in addition to the podcast that I'm doing good game with Sarah Spain, I also do three women's sports updates every single day that run across all 500 I Heart Radio stations. The goal there is for the average person who's driving in their car listening to Dua Lipa to suddenly hear about a big game between LSU and South Carolina on Friday night that they otherwise wouldn't know about. And we've been doing that for men's sports for men's sports for the entirety of my existence, sports, traffic and weather. And when we said sports, we meant men's sports, it's opt out, not opt in. We're gonna get it whether you want it. And now we're trying to do that with women's sports, where, if you're just driving along, you're gonna learn about the P, W, H, L and unrivaled and things like that.

Matt Cundill  46:58  
What is deep blue sports entertainment? So Laura

Sarah Spain  47:01  
corenti started this. She worked at, I want to say, called big spoon, or giant spoon, sports marketing and connecting brands and events and products and people in leagues and things for a long time, and then spun off deep blue to focus on the women's side. She was the one who kind of was thinking, I'm looking at a lack of inventory and a lack of content to pair with the sponsors that I see that I see that want to be involved in this space. So she throws events and conferences, in addition to masterminding and partnering with I heart on this I heart women's sports network.

Matt Cundill  47:32  
You're co authoring a book. Who are you co authoring it with

Sarah Spain  47:36  
Dylan McCullough. He's the running backs coach and associate head coach for Notre Dame football. At the time we met, he was a running backs coach for the Kansas City Chiefs. Won a Super Bowl with them, just went to the national championship with Notre Dame. And he has an incredible life story of being adopted, having a rough life, getting into football, getting recruited by a guy who grew up in the same hometown as him, Youngstown, Ohio, named Sherman Smith, who had gone on to the NFL and came back, recruited him to play for Miami of Ohio. They hit it off. He goes on to try to be in the NFL, suffers some injuries, becomes a coach, starts a family, has all these boys, four boys, doesn't have any medical information about them, doesn't have any answers about his true identity from before his adoption, and finally, in his 40s, the laws change, and he can go looking for his birth certificate, finds his mom on Facebook, unmarried, never had kids. Was a high school honor student that got sent away to have the baby and hidden before, you know, coming back to school, not telling anyone, and she never told the dad. And you know, she said, Well, you deserve to know who your dad is. And it's this man named Sherman Smith. And so it turns out his college football coach and mentor of 30 years was his dad the whole time, but neither of them knew it. So it's this really incredible story of sort of nature versus nurture and how you become who you are. Because he essentially recreated his dad's whole life without knowing it was his dad. And what did he pick up from his adopted family and his life, and what was ingrained in him, in genetics and emotional DNA and everything else. Favorite

Matt Cundill  48:56  
player from the 1999 US women's soccer team, not named Julie Fauci.

Sarah Spain  49:02  
Oh, that's mean, there's too many. I mean, Brianna scurry is amazing. I think I gotta go with Brandi Chastain, though, because not only do I know her now, and she's just a light and so fun and goofy and silly, but the symbol that she became, you know, obviously may Hamza superstar, but the symbol that brandy became, and the way it's endured, is super powerful, just something that you did in the moment.

Matt Cundill  49:22  
Yeah? And I can name more us women soccer players than American Yeah,

Sarah Spain  49:28  
oh, I mean, yeah, it's funny. People like, well, what's your MLS team? I'm like, I can name, like, four MLS teams. What's your premier league? I don't care about Premier League. Like, women's soccer is much more interesting to me than men.

Matt Cundill  49:40  
But come on, secretly, though you wish Christine Sinclair was American. Listen,

Sarah Spain  49:45  
I'm supposed to hate her. She's the enemy. But how is that even possible? She is so freaking talented. Yeah, we would have loved to have her around. That would have been nice. We would have beaten you even

Matt Cundill  49:55  
more. So I did see that Sarah Spain went to Spain and you were in Mali. I believe it was some some tennis. Yeah, Billy Jean King cup. Where did you go to eat that I should go to eat when I'm in Malaga? Well, I'm a terrible

Sarah Spain  50:06  
example, because I'm a vegetarian, and when you go somewhere that's known for its, you know, abercro ham and pork, but if I remember, I'll, I'll send you a link to the one place that I thought was the best. We had a lot of similar tapas, because it's all the ones that are, you know, the cheese and the vegetables instead of the meats. But there was one that was especially good. I mean, you can't go wrong wandering around, finding a place with a beautiful patio that opens out until square, have a glass of wine, have one or two tapas, and then move to somewhere else. And do that again again. You get to try lots of spots. I'm pretty

Matt Cundill  50:37  
sure you went to malagata for, I think, CHROs or a breakfast sandwich or something,

Speaker 1  50:42  
ooh, not sure I might have. Sarah,

Matt Cundill  50:45  
thanks so much for taking the time to do all this and answering all my questions. Thanks

Sarah Spain  50:50  
for having me and being so well researched and asking such good ones. Makes it fun. The

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  50:54  
sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Kendall, produced by Evan sir Minsky, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai