On International Women’s Day, NBC Sports made NHL history by producing the first-ever all-women broadcast on US airwaves. IBC365 chats to play-by-play announcer Kate Scott to find out more about the historic broadcast.
To mark International Women’s Day, an NBC Sports producer came up with an idea – a major NHL game between the St Louis Blues and the Chicago Blackhawks set to be aired on the service could be broadcast entirely by women.
The game, which took place on 8 March, was aired on NBCSN. In total, roughly 30 women worked on the game for NBC, both behind the scenes and on-air.
Far from the ‘boys club’ of many sports broadcasters, NBC employs dozens of women who produce and broadcast sports content. However, they rarely work together.
In an interview with ESPN, NBC producer Kaitlin Urka, who pitched the idea to NBC executives in December, said: “I hope when fans watch this game, they see it as any other game.
“And I want people to think, this is something that they’re going to see all the time, eventually. I want to get to the point where we don’t need to make this a big deal.
“We don’t need people writing stories about it and we don’t need press releases and it’s just normalised.”
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