Happy Birthday ESPN! Linda Cohn and Hannah Storm Reflect on the Worldwide Leader’s Impact on Women’s Sports

In the late 1980s, when future “SportsCenter” legend Linda Cohn wanted to move up the ladder in her career from Long Island cable news, she made a big batch of chocolate chip cookies one day for her camera operator. It was a bribe to persuade him to stay late to help her film a spec sports report that she sent out to TV stations in pursuit of her dream job as a sports anchor.

Fortunately for Cohn, KIRO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Seattle, gave her a shot. The Long Island native covered sports in the Pacific Northwest for a little more than two years, until she got the nod that would change her life. There were no baked goods involved when Cohn moved back across the country in 1992 to join ESPN and the formidable bench of anchors who front its flagship news program “SportsCenter.”

“The label on women in sports before that was, ‘Oh they can’t handle the pressure. What if the Prompter goes down? Their tone is too high or too low.’ It was excuse after excuse,” Cohn recalls.

But the presence of ESPN changed everything. “ESPN gave me that chance. [Executives] John Walsh and Steve Anderson hired me and believed in me,” she says.

As ESPN turns 45 today – the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network set sail from Bristol, Conn., at 7 p.m. ET on Sept. 7 – the network that redefined sports television has naturally been a big part of the growth spurt that women’s sports has enjoyed this year. Cohn and fellow long-serving ESPN anchor Hannah Storm spoke to Variety about the Worldwide Leader’s role in creating a bigger platform for women’s collegiate and professional leagues and teams, as well as for women in the business of sports.

“ESPN has become part of the fabric of generations. I call it America’s wallpaper because it’s everywhere. It’s in every cab, it’s in every airport. And ‘SportsCenter’ is one of the great brands in the history of television,” Storm says.

Storm joined ESPN in 2008 after working for NBC Sports and CNN and doing a turn as a morning TV anchor on CBS’ “The Early Show.” She was the first play-by-play announcer for the WNBA when the league launched in 1997. She saw first-hand how ESPN’s 24/7 presence gave the fledgling league oxygen. The surge of interest fueled by the strength of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball tournament has been a long time coming.

“ESPN has always put resources behind women’s basketball. They’ve been putting top broadcasters on women’s basketball. They broadcast women’s basketball as they broadcast men’s basketball,” Storm says. “The setup was there for this kind of perfect storm for what happened in this past year.”

The first female anchor to join ESPN fulltime was Rhonda Glenn in 1981. Glenn, who died at age 68 in 2015, had been a prominent collegiate and amateur golfer.

She’d worked as a golf analyst for ABC Sports (long before ABC and ESPN were connected through Disney ownership) in the three years leading up to her move to “SportsCenter.” In his new book “The Early Days of ESPN,” author Peter Fox calls Glenn “ESPN’s “Sally Ride.”

In a 2013 profile for ESPN Front Row, Glenn maintained that she never felt driven to be a barrier-breaker. Like Cohn, she simply loved sports, especially golf.

“I never wanted to be the first, I just wanted the job,” Glenn told ESPN.

Glenn stayed in Bristol for only two years before she left for other sports gigs, including more golf coverage for ABC Sports and a job in communications for the U.S. Golf Association. But her ethos that women who know their stuff can be just as strong on air as male anchors remains strong.

It took Cohn about a year to find her footing on ESPN. Finally, she heard her bosses loud and clear when they gave her some blunt feedback: “They finally said to me, ‘Linda, we see you in the newsroom. We hear you talking sports, naturally.’ They wanted me to be that on air. And I’m like, ‘Great. I can do that,’ ” she recalls.

If Glenn is the Sally Ride, then Cohn is the Sue Bird of ESPN. By February 2016, she logged a record 5,000 episodes of “SportsCenter.” She marked 30 years at the brand in 2022. Cohn’s longevity itself has been significant for women in sports media.

“I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and say ‘I grew up with you.’ And then they tell me their stories — they went on to be broadcasters, or sideline reporters,” Cohn says. “And they say that seeing you there on ‘SportsCenter’ made me believe that a woman could do this. That people wouldn’t look at us like we were from Mars. It’s OK to be a woman and love sports.”

Cohn, who also contributes to ESPN’s NHL coverage, grew up playing co-ed field hockey on Long Island. Storm has been steeped in the business of sports since childhood. Her late father, Mike Storen, was a team owner, a team general manager and commissioner of the American Basketball Association, which merged with the National Basketball Association in 1976. She credits one of her father’s NBA successors – longtime commissioner David Stern – for planting the seeds more than 25 years ago for the contemporary expansion of women’s professional basketball.

Stern headed the NBA from 1984 to 2014. He saw the opportunity emerging in women’s basketball – and he used the success of the U.S. women’s basketball team at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta to convince NBA team owners to invest in an expansion league. Stern championed the launch in the Women’s National Basketball Association the following year.

The opportunity for top female college stars to transition to an established professional league in the U.S. has been an enormous boost for the cause of women’s sports. The college hoops stars who seized the spotlight of March Madness this year – Caitlin Clark, Kamilla Cardoso, Angel Reese, among others – have never known a world without the WNBA. ESPN set an NCAA ratings record in April with its coverage of the women’s championship game.

“The ratings for women’s basketball have steadily going up. The fans have been there,” Storm says. “What happened this year was a whole bunch of other people jumped on board. College basketball caught their imagination because the games were incredible and these particular personalities and skills of these players lent themselves to the kind of rivalry, the kind of fierceness and the kind of competitiveness that we’re used to seeing for men. It was so fierce and so competitive and so in your face, and such the stuff of sports debate shows and things beyond highlights that it literally just took the interest in the game to another level,” Storm says.

In Cohn’s view, another big milestone for the sector has been a generational shift in mindset around women covering sports, working as coaches and in front offices.

The now-cliché scene in every sports movie that shows athletes bristling when a female sports reporter enters a locker room? That happened all the time in her early career, Cohn says. Today, ESPN has no less than seven female anchors for the various “SportsCenter” telecasts throughout the day.

“The athletes we interview now grew up with women covering sports so that’s not an issue,” Cohn says. “I’ve always felt strongly that it’s very important to have women in those settings to show they belong and that they really want to be there. If you’re there doing sports as a stepping-stone to ‘Access Hollywood’ or something, athletes see right through it. They can pick a phony a mile away. And yeah, they’re harsher on women.”

Storm credits ESPN and the depth of its coverage across every daypart for elevating the influence of sports throughout popular culture.

“It enabled sports to go to that next level of analysis,” Storm said. “I’ve been on the desk for bombing at the Boston Marathon. I’ve been on the desk for the everything that happened in Penn State, for Michael Sam, coming out when he played the NFL. Ray Rice. I have been there for things that we didn’t used to talk about in sports,” Storm says.

“But because ESPN was a news network we were able to not only cover the breadth of everything that happened in depth. As ESPN began to have the ability to cover them, ESPN started bringing new voices into the table, including voices we hadn’t heard from before,” Storm observes.

All of which grew have evolved into a bustling sports media eco-system powered by the flywheel effect of live events, linear and streaming TV and social media, Storm said. That expansion across multiple platforms – both Cohn and Storm now also host fan-focused podcasts – has naturally opened up more doors for women.

“It’s been wonderful to see so many incredible female broadcasters getting opportunities that they hadn’t gotten before,” Storm says. “It’s been a really, really, really cool evolution to watch.”

(Pictured top: Hannah Storm and National Women’s Soccer League Commissioner Jessica Berman on ‘SportsCenter’ in April)