As professional sports slowly started coming back over the course of 2020, providing a welcome bit of relief and even a degree of quasi-normalcy amid the still-raging coronavirus pandemic, most of us probably took for granted what was required behind the scenes to pull it all off. And not just behind the scenes, for that matter — in front of the camera, too.
If you watched Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews during the NFL season, for example, you know what we mean. You were reminded of this when you saw her, standing above the field behind a railing, lobbing questions down at socially distanced players. It was one example, among so many, of how comprehensively things had changed.
Welcome to a day in the life of a sportscaster in the age of COVID-19, when the act of committing journalism is stranger and can feel a bit more chaotic — but is still as fulfilling as it’s ever been, at least for someone like Andrews. She’s one of the most high-profile sports broadcasters in the industry who, these days, produces sideline coverage and features for Fox NFL Sunday, a show with more than 56.4 million unique viewers. And that’s in addition to reporting for NFL Thursday Night Football. “There’s really nothing else I wanted to do with my life,” Andrews said in an interview with Forbes. In a lot of ways, she continued, “Sports is the greatest reality TV show there is out there. We just never know what’s going to happen — and when it does, you have to be ready to go.”
Last year certainly underscored the truth of that assessment. Really, though, Andrews has always demonstrated a resilience and agility throughout her career that continues to lead her down new paths — from the hard work required during the eight years she spent at ESPN, prior to her current gig with Fox, or the itch to try something new that brought her to ABC’s reality series Dancing With The Stars, which she co-hosted with Tom Bergeron for 11 seasons (and even participated in as a contestant in 2010).
Lately, meanwhile, Andrews has also been building out a parallel aspect to her professional brand — as a creator and spokeswoman.
When Forbes caught up with her, she’d just recorded the first episode of a new podcast she’s been preparing to launch February 17 with a Fox Sports colleague — “Calm Down with Erin and Charissa.” According to the description already available in Apple’s
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Back in 2019, as if all that wasn’t enough, Andrews also added the launch of a fashion brand, WEAR, to her already lengthy resume. And 2020 saw her expand that NFL-themed clothing line for women, with the addition of new offerings as well as NBA and select college team stylings.
But before we get deeper into all that, let’s start first with how much Andrew’s main gig itself changed in 2020.
If you haven’t gotten your vaccine yet, think about the discomfort you’d feel inside somewhere like an airport right now. And then put yourself in the shoes of Andrews, someone whose seemingly effortless presence in front of the camera belies the fact that this was the job she’d always dreamed of having ever since she was a teenager, and she worked for it accordingly. With everything that entails, from the binder’s worth of prep material she’ll pull together ahead of a game to going the extra mile to stay dialed in with the relevant teams — to the pandemic-related precautions she’s had to follow to just get herself to all those games.
“Flying four times a week on a commercial airline, just hoping to God you wouldn’t get sick — hoping I wouldn’t bring anything home to my husband and still trying to stay sane on the road and think about the game, it was a lot,” Andrews said, recalling the whirlwind of 2020. “It was a lot to handle. We were right there. We were flying cross-country, flying on holidays. It was pretty scary.”
And how about on the field itself? “We do a lot of preparation beforehand, with watching film and talking with coaches and players — the pre-game aspect. Then players are walking out catching balls and having fun out there, so you could probably talk to, like, 10 guys at a time including different coaches, the backup quarterback, you can talk to the kicker, ask him where he feels comfortable — but, again, a lot of that day-of game access was all gone. We didn’t have any of that.”
As she explains it, the preparation for games generally unfolds nonstop from first thing Monday until Saturday night. She works out in the mornings, and then it’s calls with the various teams. Different players call to talk to her (“Your life kind of revolves around their schedule”). They have practice at a certain time, there might be a quarterback meeting she tracks, there’s an offensive meeting — sportscasters are kind of at the mercy of all of it. “That’s just how it is. It’s very intense, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Especially now, with the media cycle and it being 24-7 and it being nonstop, that’s … you’ve got to keep up with it.
“I can go into a game with a binder full of stuff, and then somebody goes down, breaks a leg, breaks a collarbone, the game takes a crazy twist. A lot of the stuff you end up preparing for doesn’t happen. You don’t get to use it, but it’s good to have it.”
She’s carried that same work ethic over to her non-broadcast endeavors, like serving as the spokesman for Tubi, Fox Entertainment’s free streaming service. Its current movie and TV lineup includes more than 30,000 titles, and you can enjoy the service on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and iPhone, to name a few participating platforms.
In addition to that, as well as the podcast, Andrews also spends a lot of her time shepherding her WEAR collection along. The clothing line expanded into the NBA last year with four new fashion styles, and for 2019/2020, the brand was the best-performing new women’s collection across the entire NFL portfolio at https://www.fanatics.com.
“I had always wanted to do this,” Andrews said about the launch of WEAR, which was actually several years in the making. “A lot of people had said, ‘Well, yeah, we know it’s an audience that needs to be catered to,’ meaning a female audience, female fans — but I don’t know, it kind of took a while for someone to believe in me.
“I’m thankful to have gotten the opportunity, I’m proud of my team, and we came back this year and crushed the numbers from last year. Even in a global pandemic. We got the NBA and NCAA as part of our clothing line now, and I hope to have the other two leagues very, very soon. It’s something I’ve been very passionate about for a long time.”
Erin started her career with Fox Sports-Florida as a freelance reporter. She joined ESPN in May 2004 as a reporter covering the National Hockey League and eventually transitioned into college football and basketball. She fell in love with the profession while watching her dad — a big sports fan himself and a just-retired investigative reporter in Tampa — regularly appear on the local 6 o’clock and 11 o’clock news when she was growing up.
Her advice for anyone thinking about a career in journalism, and sports broadcasting in particular? “You have to have thick skin. You want people to like you, and you want everybody to think that you care and you’re doing a good job and you're there for the right reasons, but you also have to realize you're not going to please everyone as much as you want to.
“If you’re doing your best and putting all you can into it, then you’re doing enough. And then study. I would study really hard, especially if you’re a female trying to crack into this business — you need to be well researched, you need to know what you’re talking about … I’m so fortunate I’ve gotten to do this, and just still love it so much.”