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For CoSIDA’s 2014 Jake Wade Award recipient Beth Mowins, her career was predetermined at a young age while growing up in Syracuse, NY.
It all began with her favorite pastime, playing sports, and a favorite toy, her Mr. Microphone.
And what a start it was.
Just playing sports in her backyard, or watching others play, wasn’t enough for Mowins. She always had the urge to talk about the action unfolding in front of her.
So, she would grab her Mr. Microphone and described the “games” taking place in front of her.
“When I was not playing, I had my Mr. Microphone besides me,” noted Mowins, “My brothers would play football in the backyard and I would broadcast the games to my mom in the kitchen. I loved doing that, and was always playing sports and talking a lot too.”
"I grew up with three brothers and a dad that was a high school basketball coach," she said. "Sports was a huge part of my life. I enjoyed playing and I watched sports on TV, too. That got me interested in broadcasting quickly and I knew early in life that's what I wanted to do.”
Hard work, constantly honing her craft and watching and listening to the “giants” in the broadcasting profession helped propel Mowins into the male-dominated sports broadcasting industry.
After working in local sports in college and graduate school, Mowins got her big break when she joined ESPN in 1994 as a play-by-play commentator, primarily for women’s basketball. Along the way, she became the just the second woman to do play-by-play for college football. In 2005, she started behind the gridiron microphone as ESPNU's voice of the Western Athletic Conference.
Today, Mowins is an accomplished and versatile college sportscaster for ESPN. Mowins curren
tly calls the ESPN2 College Football Saturday afternoon game and finds herself
hop-scotching around the nation as a play-by-play analyst for college football, women’s basketball, softball, soccer and volleyball.
In the summer, she can be found on WNBA broadcasts and has broadcast internationally, covering World Cup women’s soccer matches and USA Soccer international play.
Mowins also serves as an occasional blogger and writer on espnW, stays active on Twitter throughout the year, and co-hosts the weekly national women’s college basketball podcast
ShootAround with Beth & Debbie alongside basketball analyst Debbie Antonelli. Developed in collaboration with the WBCA, it’s the first weekly podcast offering in-depth coverage of women’s basketball and is now housed on espn.com.
For her talents and her ability to “tell the story of college athletics” across many sports, Mowins is the recipient of CoSIDA’s 2014 Jake Wade Award. The Jake Wade Award is presented annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution in the media to the field of intercollegiate athletics.
It is named for the late Jake Wade who was a widely acclaimed sports journalist and national magazine contributor for
Charlotte Observer for 16 years and later served as sports information director at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 1946-62.
“We congratulate Beth on her Jake Wade Award. Beth is one of our most versatile play-by-play voices, is a role model for women in this industry and a valuable part of ESPN for the last 20 years,” said Dave Miller, ESPN senior coordinating producer.
Mowins is the eighth ESPN-based media representative to claim the Jake Wade Award since former ESPN executive Rosa Gatti led the way for ESPN, becoming the young network’s first honoree in 1987. Mowins becomes the fifth female media member to earn the Wade Award, joining Gatti, Robin Roberts (2002), Christine Brennan (2003) and fellow ESPN sportscaster Pam Ward (2010).
“It is a tremendous honor it is to win the Jake Ward Award,” noted Mowins, reflecting on her media honor. “I was absolutely stunned when notified that I was the 2014 recipient. Jake Ward set such a high standard of excellence back in his day.
“It is truly humbling to join the esteemed group of previous award winners,” Mowins said. “I love telling the stories and seeing the passion of the student-athletes, coaches and fans involved in college sports. Whenever you're covering a college event there is a certain electricity on campus that you can't help but feed off of."
“I hold CoSIDA and the athletic media relations professionals around the country in such high regard,” Mowins added. “The hard-working SIDs make our jobs so much easier and so much more enjoyable. I thank everyone for sharing their stories and insights, and I thank the CoSIDA members for thinking of me for this great honor.”
Moving from those early days with “Mr. Microphone,” Mowins’ career has evolved through her trademark hard work inside and outside athletic competition.
An accomplished high school athlete in Syracuse, Beth went to on star for the Lafayette College basketball team from 1985-89. She was a three-time All-Conference selection, a 1,000-point scorer and, as the career assist leader to this day, holds the top four single season assist marks in program history. (She was enshrined into the Lafayette Maroon Club Hall of Fame in 2005 and also is a member of the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame.)
The pull toward broadcasting never subsided for the English major. Working at Lafayette’s radio station in her spare time, she interned at local TV stations during the summer in her hometown of Syracuse. Upon graduation from Lafayette, she was accepted at Syracuse University's prestigious S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and earned her master’s degree in communications in 1990.
Working at local TV stations and as a late-night disc jockey, Mowins parlayed that experience into her first full-time job with a fledgling Syracuse news and sports radio station. Eyeing the TV market as she watched sports on TV and studied the tendencies and style of sports broadcasters, she sent out demo tapes to local and regional venues and impressed some Big East Conference representatives enough to land a job working chiefly with women's basketball, calling the action at Syracuse and in the Big East Conference before her break at ESPN.
Her early broadcasting role models were the great Dodger announcer Vin Scully - “He is baseball to me,” notes Mowins – and award-winning college football play-by-play announcer Keith Jackson.
"I found my niche on regional and national TV at a time when women's events were starting to hit the airwaves," Mowins recalled in a lehighvalleylive.com profile a few years ago. "It's my goal on the air to be informative, knowledgeable and entertaining, and I'm always picking up on techniques from other announcers
. Once people got comfortable with my work, that's when opportunities started to open up with men’s sports.”
Her versatility and ease of movement between sports is shown in some of the assignments she has had over the last few months. In the summer, she served as a play-by-play announcer for the group stage of the Women's World Cup in Germany. In the fall, she teamed with former Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti on ESPN2 football telecasts.
In December, while doing football and early season women’s basketball games, she also called the NCAA Division I women’s volleyball final four with three-time Olympic gold
medalist Karch Kiraly, a CoSIDA Capital One Academic All-America Hall of Famer, on ESPN platforms. During the NCAA Division I Women’s Final Four in Nashville, Mowins could be found doing play-by-play on the Westwood One radio. Leading up to the CoSIDA Convention in Orlando, she is spending her time broadcasting Division I softball championship games, culminating in doing play-by-play at the 2014 Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City.
“I’ve worked closely with Beth for years and you won’t find a more diligent, prepared and respectful professional,” noted Melanie Jackson, ESPN.com’s women’s basketball editor.
“She will find the unique stories and anecdotes in college athletics, and works them – and humor - into her broadcasts, blogs and podcasts. Beth makes it appear easy as she moves between sports, broadcasting three or four different sports in a months’ span, but we know there is a tremendous amount of homework, study and video work that goes into her game preparation.”
A few years ago, Mowins chronicled her life as a multi-sports broadcaster, one which finds her spending over 40 weeks a year on the road.
In November of 2011 she embarked on a grueling 18-day mult-sport/mulit-city road trip and chronicled from the road in an ESPN.com online video diary and blog. Mowins prepped and delivered seven telecasts across five events (Wisconsin-Illinois football, UConn-Stanford women’s basketball, UConn-Rutgers football, ESPNU NCAA women's volleyball tournament selection show in Charlotte, N.C. and the NCAA Women’s Soccer College Cup semis and finals in Kennesaw, Ga.).
She battled different time zones, weather, shifting sports, seven airports, many car rentals and five hotels. A self-proclaimed “America’s Houseguest,” Mowins had 13 nights in hotels and was fortunate to spend three nights with friends for the holiday break. She spent just two nights in her San Diego home during that span.
“It was challenge to figure out what to wear, how to do game research on the road and to actually know, what city I was in! But I wouldn’t trade it for the world: There is nothing better than the human drama of athletics. It’s the real, reality TV,” Mowins noted at the time.
With proven success in a profession long dominated by men, Mowins offers this advice to aspiring female broadcasters who want to follow a similar path from backyard sports to the broadcast booth.
“Don’t be afraid to ask people ‘why,’ ‘what if’.” Ask questions and don’t settle on the sidelines. Attack your career,” she advises.
“Coming up in the business, I was asked, ‘hey, can you do soccer? Can you do wrestling on the radio?’ I’d always say, ‘Sure, I can do that’. It was a terrific training ground. It was a matter of doing the research and seeking out other TV programs, shows and games to study how the best in the business did it. I was always watching because I wanted to see how the really good ones did it, hoping that one day I would be able to do it myself. And, I’m extremely fortunate I’ve been able to pursue this career.”