Beth Mowins, Doris Burke, and Lisa Salters will serve as the broadcast crew for ESPN’s first national game led entirely by women on Wednesday night in Salt Lake City.
FILE - ESPN announcer Doris Burke is shown prior to an NBA basketball game between the New Orleans Pelicans and the Dallas Mavericks in Dallas, Wednesday, March 4, 2020. Burke will set another milestone later this month when she calls the conference and NBA Finals for ESPN Radio. Burke will be the first woman to serve as a game analyst on a network television or radio broadcast this deep into the postseason.
“This is what we do every day. So for us, it doesn’t feel like something different; this is what we do two, three times a week,” Salters said. “And yet, the significance of the moment isn’t lost.” Salters is an award-winning journalist who is the longest-tenured “Monday Night Football” sideline reporter ever, as well as ABC’s sideline reporter for the NBA Finals. Burke won the Curt Gowdy Media Award in 2018, and became the first woman to serve as a game analyst for the NBA Finals in 2020 when she joined the ESPN Radio team.
“One of the most exciting parts of this for me is there’s a group of women who will never be seen tonight in various roles: tape, graphics, audio, operations … I guarantee you each and every one of them — just like the three of us — have been in a position at some point where the only person in the room who was of your gender was yourself,” Burke said. “So now it’s unique that this entire broadcast is basically filled with women.
Mowins added that the three of them getting to be the faces of a very public and historic moment is meaningful. To some degree, after all, as Mowins said, it’s just a basketball game, and just three people talking about a basketball game.