Catching up with... Hannah Storm

While her allegiances might not be as well known as other celebrities, Hannah Storm takes a back seat to no Notre Dame fan. In between trailblazing a path as an award-winning sports and newscaster, raising three daughters, writing books, producing movies, and starting her own charitable foundation, Hannah never misses a Saturday with the Notre Dame football team.

I was lucky enough to track down Hannah on her commute home from work, where she co-hosts daytime SportsCenter with Josh Elliott. (As pictured.) We spent plenty of time discussing a journalism career that started as a student broadcaster at WNDU, the late game antics of this Irish football team, and everything in between.

I hope you enjoy Catching Up... with Hannah Storm.

ON JOINING ESPN AFTER A STORIED CAREER AT CNN, NBC, AND CBS:

I love news, political reporting and covering breaking news, and loved the diversity of morning television news in particular, but after several years away, I began to really appreciate the concept and quality of sports broadcasting. It’s like doing breaking news all the time. Each game is an event. In a three hour show, you do quite a bit of breaking sports news, and you get to exercise those muscles a lot. Helping ESPN launch daytime SportsCenter, it was a perfect marriage with my experience and sensibilities. It worked with my personal life and having three children and being with them when they got off the bus, and not a lot of travel on the weekend. That daytime/morning slot, it has always been a big priority for me as a mom, and it felt like the best place for me to work. And the allure of being able to talk sports on TV for 15 hours a week, that was pretty powerful.

ON BALANCING FAMILY LIFE WITH HUSBAND DAN HICKS, NBC’S GOLF HOST:

One person is always at home. Dan is gone a good portion of weekends and the tail-end of the week. The weekends I usually have off, except during football seasons, where I work Sunday mornings, but it gives me all of Saturday and most of Sunday to be around. I have the furthest drive of everybody except one other regular anchor at ESPN, so I have a long commute every day, but I listen to the radio on the way in to catch up, and on the way home I do a lot of business. It usually works out where he’s there to take the kids to school in the morning and I’m home when the kids get home. Our schedules balance out really well, but sometimes it makes it that we don’t get enough time together, but in terms of our family as a whole, it works out well with our daughters.

ON STARTING A SPORTS-JOURNALISM CAREER AFTER GRADUATING FROM ND:

Sports were a part of my life, part of dinner table discussions and the fabric of my family. Sports were naturally where I wanted to go, but the only problem was there weren’t women doing sportscasting at the time. It was a highly unusual career choice and one that was quite challenging to get off the ground. I literally send hundreds of resumes and tapes with my work in college where I was a news reporter at WNDU. I couldn’t get anyone to hire me, and a male news director in a small market told me that a woman in that position is something the audience wouldn’t embrace and a sports director wouldn’t be happy working with a woman. On and on... I heard this from every single office I got into.

So my father, the ultimate optimist, said there are way more radio stations than TV stations, so I started applying for radio jobs. I went and made a radio tape, sat in the studio and recorded a couple of sports reports and started sending my radio tapes out. I got a job offer to do news in San Angelo, Texas and one to be a disc jockey at a heavy metal station in Corpus Christi. So I started DJ’ing in Corpus Christ and from there I kept trying to get into sports and finally I answered an ad for a job as a sportscaster in Houston during afternoon drive. It wasn’t very far away, so I made another reel, recorded it, and literally drove my tape and resume to Houston, went to the office, and sat in the lobby and waited for the program director. I was nervous, but how else was I going to introduce myself? I gave a very quick hello and handing him my reel and resume. I got a call back within three or four days, and the only thing he said that he really liked in my resume was that I had gone to Notre Dame.

ON PUBLIC SERVICE HOLDING A SPECIAL PLACE IN HER HEART:

My mother was very service oriented when we were growing up. That was something that was also part of our family’s fabric and something that flourished at Notre Dame, because there were so many opportunities to volunteer. I always dreamed of establishing a journalism scholarship of some sort, and also because I was born with a pretty significant birth mark on my face called a Port-wine stain, always wanted to help other children that were born in my position and needed surgery, but weren’t as fortunate as I was. Now that I have the ability to put my name on a foundation, after leaving CBS I started the Hannah Storm Foundation. We do a journalism scholarship through the alumni office at Notre Dame that allows kids to actually get real practical experience and build a portfolio of things that are published when they leave school. The other big part of our mission is to advocate on a national scale on behalf of children with these birthmarks. We’re working with the US government to change the insurance code so families will have an easier time getting covered, as well as going state by state getting Port-wine stains listed as medical procedures so people don’t have to pay out of pocket to get these surgeries. There are a lot of people that have this condition and just because of a birthmark they aren’t drawn to a profession in the public eye. It’s not a cause that’s talked about and I’m just very fortunate that I can have some type of celebrity that helps me bring a voice to this.

ON COVERING THE IRISH AS A NATIONAL JOURNALIST:

At NBC, I was told if there’s ever a flicker of favoritism towards Notre Dame that it’d be the last Notre Dame game I’d ever do. NBC was really conscientious in a very responsible way of making sure that we were fair, and as a ND grad, they went to me and said that I can’t show any favoritism for my alma mater. For me, it was a great exercise in being objective. Let’s face it, as a news reporter and a sports reporter, it’s critical.

Now that I’m at ESPN everyone who watches our show sort of knows that Josh like the Dodgers and the Lakers and I like Notre Dame, the Rockets and the Braves. Our show is very personality oriented, and when I was at CBS on the Early Show and now at ESPN, those kind of things leak out. Now I’m more well known as an avid Irish fan, although I obviously report the game objectively. There’s no way to flip it around or make it into something it’s not. If anything, I’m probably more brutally honest about my school because it’s mine and I care so much about it.

ON THE FATE OF THE IRISH FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON:

With this team, who knows? They’ve played so many close games and they’ve had the luck of the Irish along the way, as well as made their own opportunities along the way. With this team, I wouldn’t even try to predict the rest of the season. But I’ll tell you one thing, you turn on a ND game, each week it’s going to be exciting. I’ve been a little nervous and missed a few five o’clock masses because the Irish haven’t wrapped things up, but I think it’s been one of the most entertaining seasons in recent memory for sure.

Just in case you thought life wasn’t busy enough for Hannah, we also spent some time talking about her upcoming ESPN 30 for 30 project, a film called Unmatched. The movie chronicles the incredible 80 match rivalry between tennis stars Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, and was Ha nnah’s first foray into the film business and was directed and produced with Emmy Award winning producers Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern. Find more about the project here.

For more information about the Hannah Storm foundation, click here.