On the Same Terms

by Christine Brennan

When I arrived at Northwestern University in the fall of 1976, I dreamed of becoming a sports journalist, but I wasn’t sure if that was possible for a woman. I had never read a woman’s byline on a sports story, and the only woman I regularly saw talking about sports on television was Phyllis George—Miss America 1971 and one of the hosts of CBS’s The NFL Today. If you had to be Miss America to land on sports television, I knew I wasn’t going to be on it. Her career path was not going to be my career path.

But in my first days on campus, I walked into an open house at the Daily Northwestern and asked to be pointed toward the sports department. I was stunned by what I saw—the sports editor was a woman. Helene Elliott (1977), a senior, gave me my first assignment as a sportswriter: a story on intramural powder-puff football. I watched a few women’s flag football games on the blustery fields beside Lake Michigan and wrote a short article, just a few hundred words. It wasn’t very good. It never ran in the paper. I never asked why.

But now I saw a path. Women could write and edit sports. It was happening right there in the Daily newsroom. At 18, newly arrived in Evanston, I knew there could be a place in this profession for me. 

Over the next four and a half years, as I received undergraduate and master’s degrees from the Medill School of Journalism, I never took a sportswriting class, for one simple reason: there wasn’t one. That was fine with me. I didn’t need to learn about sports. As a six-sport high school athlete and an avid sports fan, I knew all about sports. What I needed to learn about was journalism.

That happened in the classroom, and it happened at the Daily. I became a staff writer, covering not sports but politics, including the 1978 North Shore congressional race. I made a brief foray into sportswriting by covering the Wildcat softball team one spring, but otherwise it was all news for me. My senior year, I was the paper’s managing editor.

But during my summers, I became a sportswriter, first at my hometown’s Toledo Blade, then on Medill’s Teaching Newspaper quarter at the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald, then at the Miami Herald, where I later started my professional career. As an intern, I found that when I worked for the sports section, I felt I was home. I was getting paid to do what people pay to do: go to sporting events. And I fell in love with it.

By 1981, I had become the first full-time woman sportswriter at the Miami Herald. By 1985, the first woman to cover Washington’s NFL team as a staff writer for the Washington Post. By 1988, the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media, starting a scholarship-internship program that has supported nearly 200 women students over the past three decades. Every year, hundreds of young women apply for those positions, and more than 1,000 women are now covering sports in the United States—for newspapers, websites, TV, and radio.

While I have been fortunate to cover every major sporting event from the Olympics to the Super Bowl, from Wimbledon to the World Series, my career of late has been devoted largely to chronicling sports as a driving force in our culture: Title IX; Donald Trump and Colin -Kaepernick; the US women’s soccer team; the use of performance-enhancing drugs; the horrors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and concussions; and the like. 

I do this in my USA Today column. I do it on CNN, ABC, PBS, and NPR. I do this because, long ago, I chose a university that taught me to be a journalist who happens to cover sports. Little did I know it then, but this would ensure for me a profession of relevance and longevity. Northwestern launched me into the adventure of a lifetime, the career of my dreams.