When Brea Lassek (Medill ’24) walked into her first WNUR Sports meeting as a freshman, she saw only one other woman in the room.
This disparity was sometimes reflected in their coverage, Lassek said. Though WNUR was Northwestern’s flagship radio broadcast publication, its national women’s sports coverage had room for improvement, she said.
Searching for female role models, Lassek never imagined that over the next four years she would change the landscape of WNUR’s female sports coverage — she would become that role model.
Although a minority, Lassek found a small but mighty community
By the time Lassek graduated, she served as WNUR’s inaugural female sports director for two years before passing down the position to another woman, Medill senior Perri Kitei.
Alongside three other female WNUR members, Lassek also founded “Her Take,” the radio station’s first podcast dedicated to covering women’s sports, hosted exclusively by women. The podcast has since been passed down to new co-hosts twice.
“It just shows how many women are involved and how seriously it’s taken,” Lassek, who now works as a producer and host at Perfect Game, said.
During Lassek’s time at NU, she said women were an “obvious” minority in WNUR. Yet, the men in the club never made her feel anything less than an equal. Lassek said they also acknowledged the unique challenges women in the sports industry face, which helped ease the burden of those barriers.
The growing lineage of female broadcasters in WNUR, as well as the inclusive community, has made the club a welcoming space for newcomers, said Medill freshman Brielle Lowry.
Lowry, the newest co-host of “Her Take,” has known she wanted to be a sports journalist since she was five-years-old. Before she arrived at NU, though, she said she worried about a lack of female representation in campus sports publications.
Lowry credits WNUR’s small but mighty female community for making her feel at home at NU. She said she feels seen and heard, and she quickly became close to the club’s cohort of women.
However, Lowry said she does not always feel welcome at other sports media organizations on campus. She said she doesn’t think those clubs are intentionally exclusionary, but that the men within them often subconsciously create that sort of environment.
“It sucks when they don’t even know they’re being exclusionary,” she said. “In a field so dominated by men, you would think they would have some awareness of how to make it more inclusive.”
Female mentorship encouraged camaraderie among women in campus sports media
Lowry also said Kitei’s efforts to go out of her way to welcome her is a key reason she joined and continued with WNUR.
Kitei, WNUR’s outgoing sports director, is also the vice president of NU’s chapter of the Association of Women in Sports Media, which hosts speaker series and other events dedicated to empowering women interested in sports journalism.
Kitei also does play-by-play and color commentary for the Big Ten Network, a dream of Lowry’s. Lowry said seeing Kitei pursue that career has inspired her to keep chasing it.
“You can always look up to someone from afar and want to be like them,” Lowry said. “But when you meet someone in real life and watch them do this, it’s even better.”
Current Daily staffer and Medill sophomore Gabriella Egozi also said Kitei was a key part of her professional growth.
Egozi said the strong female mentorship at NU has been integral to her development, in part due to Medill’s alumni network, which boasts numerous trailblazing women in sports media. This includes play-by-play commentator and studio host Lisa Byington and the Denver Nuggets’ first female analyst Katy Winge, both of whom recently returned to campus to speak to sports journalists.
Medill junior and outgoing Inside NU Editor in Chief Sophia Vlahakis also said she never would have begun reporting on sports if not for the female upperclassmen that paved the way. She said she considers herself lucky that these women invested in creating a safe and inclusive community for women in sports media.
Considering Inside NU’s male-dominated editorial board, Vlahakis emphasized that the men were also supportive. As editor in chief, she said the men were her “backbone,” and that they never second-guessed their support of her.
For Medill students covering NU sports, the success of the women’s teams — particularly lacrosse and field hockey — has cultivated an environment in which women’s sports coverage is prioritized by campus media, Vlahakis said.
Vlahakis has covered NU’s journeys to two women’s lacrosse national championships in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and the field hockey national championship in 2023.
“The lacrosse athletes I’ve covered are the best athletes at this school,” Vlahakis said. “The field hockey team has gone to the championship like four times in a row. That’s an incredible level of dominance.”
There’s still more work to be done, though
Although Medill sophomore and Inside NU Editor in Chief Yanyan Li said she has never felt excluded in sports media spaces, she wishes they had more women. For instance, she said, Inside NU only has a few women actively involved in the publication.
“I definitely believe that the more women involved, the better,” Li said.
Lowry estimated that only a quarter of the people who consistently attend WNUR meetings are women. She said this number is an improvement from a few years ago, but she wishes more women would join.
Outside of campus publications, Lowry said she has seen more women entering sports media, particularly in broadcast. Lowry said women have always been well-represented in sideline reporting, but not in analyst and play-by-play positions. However, she said she has seen more women stepping into analyst and commentator roles in the last few years.
“I think it only goes up from here,” Lowry said. “There’s no better time to break into the industry.”
Kitei said she has been lucky to have been in workplaces — including NBC and ESPN —where she saw other women in the newsroom.
However, Kitei added that she hasn’t had that experience everywhere.
In 2023, Kitei worked as a play-by-play commentator for the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox of the Cape Cod Baseball League, a prestigious collegiate summer baseball league.
Among the 25 broadcasters for the 10 team league, she was the only woman.
“At the time, I hadn’t really realized the scope of what I was signing up for or the opportunity I had been given,” Kitei said.
Kitei said male commentators often would fail to shake her hand when she arrived at the field because they assumed — as a woman — she wasn’t a commentator, too. She said it was “frustrating” to have to introduce herself, but that she counts herself lucky for having a supportive team behind her.
Kitei was the first woman to call the league’s All-Star Game, despite the broadcast program existing for more than 20 years.
Kitei said she sees that milestone as a marker of how far the world has come in female representation in sports broadcasting, particularly in historically male-dominated sports and leagues.
Even though sports media has come a long way, Kitei said she still occasionally receives pushback from her audience.
She recently broadcasted a NU baseball game for WNUR and said she saw a hate comment on X saying she should be banned from sports forever for being a woman in sports journalism.
“When you have people telling you that you can’t succeed or that you should stop because you’re not gonna be good enough, that’s a barrier for a lot of women,” Kitei said. “Doing something where you are a minority and your voice isn’t the norm and recognizing that a lot of people are gonna hate you for that because they’re misogynistic is the biggest barrier.”
Lowry agreed that the fear of pushback is a key barrier for women wanting to get involved in sports media.
She said that it’s important for women to have the mentality that they deserve to be in sports media spaces and not succumb to the backlash.
“Showing up, showing your presence, and not backing down is so important,” Lowry said. “The worst thing you could do is roll over and give in to the people who don’t take you seriously.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Northwestern’s women’s lacrosse national championship appearances. They were in 2023 and 2024. The Daily regrets this error.
Email: a.singh@dailynorthwestern.edu
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