Erin Andrews did not have the best of the starts of her broadcasting career. Fresh out of the University of Florida in 2000, she was looking for her first break. Eventually, she started it with the Tampa Bay Lightning as a rink-side reporter in September 2001 at 22. The thing was, she knew nothing about hockey! Growing up in the Tampa Bay area, she went to Lightning games occasionally, but ask her the difference between a power play and a penalty kill, and she is doomed. Way out? She crammed the day before her interview with a copy of “Hockey for Dummies” bought at a Barnes & Noble. Another factor further complicated the matter.

The Lightning weren’t going through their best time, having recently hired John Tortorella as coach to replace fired Steve Ludzik. A reporter with zero knowledge about the NHL was the last thing Tortorella wanted around his team. But despite lacking hockey knowledge, Andrews had brought two of her trademarks with her: passion and hard work. So, she did something that might have been least likely for a reporter as naive as her.

“I walked up to him [Tortorella], and I just said, ‘Hi, I’m Erin Andrews. I’m gonna be really honest with you. I don’t know anything about the NHL. I am a huge sports fan. All I kind of really know about is the Florida Gators because I just graduated college, but I’m willing to listen and I’m willing to learn.’,” Andrews revealed. So it took off. Just two months into it, and Erin’s hard work started showing their colors.

Andrews asked how defenseman Nolan Pratt made an impact on the team given the recent stretch of good games it had been playing. Tortorella stopped the media scrum and told it was the first good question he’d heard all day. She had proven it. The job helped a career that led Andrews to bigger opportunities at Turner Sports and later ESPN, where she started covering their NHL broadcast back in 2004. Since then, she’s covered just about every major sporting event you can think of, whether that’s the World Series, Daytona 500 and Super Bowl. And if there is anything that shone through, that was her efforts. On a recent episode of her podcast Andrews gave a glimpse of that.

“I worked my ass off, [and] it was never enough,” Andrews said of her network’s earliest days. There was a point when she was doing two football games a week—“That is so friggin’ hard,” she said of it. When she joined ESPN in 2004, she did it all: college football, college basketball, Major League Baseball, college baseball, the Little League World Series and the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Back then, she pointed out, she didn’t worry or care about sharing her personal life with audiences. It wasn’t possible either, there was no Instagram, Twitter or TikTok. “Back then, you’re not posting your outfit of the day—which, thank God, because what I wore was hysterical,” she laughed. Those first gigs weren’t flashy, but they were a stepping stone. The more she got into it, her love for sports flourished more.

“For me, when I first started, I was just so excited to have my job. I love sports so much…. [I was] just so excited to learn, to read, to study about these athletes that I’m a huge fan of,” Erin noted. Maybe it is because of this attachment to sports that she still goes all in to prepare for it. Erin, who now exclusively covers the NFL for FOX, where she joined in 2012, had given an account of it to Forbes last year.

“I read a ton. We get clips sent to us every single day of all the teams and in the league and all the articles written about them. And then I go on a deeper dive after that. I pull up articles on different websites, I go on the team’s websites, I watch all their locker room interviews. We’re on calls with the players and the coaches every single week, then I get other players to call me where my group didn’t hear from. I can offer different things that could be helpful and useful,” Erin explained.

She also says that whenever she’s preparing for an upcoming game, she’ll watch the two previous games of each team to be “updated.” Interestingly, according to her, three-fourths of the preparation isn’t used during the broadcast. “You never want to get into a situation where you’re like, I didn’t have this. It’s a lot of over preparing, but I’m so neurotic that it works out better for me,” Erin says of being a sideline reporter. But what is her drive to chime in with that extra effort?

“Being a woman in a male-dominated industry, you are so afraid of people thinking you are weak,” Erin had said. This is the perception that she wants to break. “I know what the perception is of women in the industry. I know what the perception by people who don’t know anything about me is. I think they believe I have my job because I look a certain way or because I’m female.”

And then I feel like when people hang out with me or talk to me on the sidelines or even see me interact with athletes, their expression is really funny – ‘Oh, wow, you really do know a lot about sports.’ I love it. It’s my favorite thing,” she had said in a podcast in 2016. Ever ready to take up challenges, she embarked on a new chapter when she joined FOX.

Finding Her Voice at Fox Sports

Then when Erin Andrews joined Fox Sports in 2012, it was a career changer. In the face of so many years of toil, she got to show her personality. Grasped with the idea to get to know players and fans a little better, Andrews did it all the way.

“I think when I went to Fox, I really was able to… show who I was,” she said. And that freedom was to relate to athletes in ways that made them seem better and made her feel better. The turn not only helped her stay in front of more viewers but also secured her ad contracts and started her own clothing line WEAR by Erin Andrews.

“I’m such a fan,” she admitted. “I really enjoy what I’m doing, and I’m having such a good time. And I think people can see that.” She loved sports, and she was quick to humor and humble, which turned her into a fan favorite, and established her as a titan of sports media.

At Fox, Andrews didn’t just find her voice; she found her groove. She became a trusted face for fans and athletes alike, proving that authenticity and passion are the ultimate game-changers in any career.

And it wasn’t only on Fox that Andrews found her calling, it was a groove. She was someone fans and athletes could turn to when they needed someone real and passionate in their lives, as they say, “this woman is built different.“And through it all, she carries the wisdom of her greatest role model: her mom. “She is the female in my life and has guided me on how to act and conduct myself,” Andrews said. From the sidelines to the spotlight, Andrews proves that passion and perseverance always win the game.