GALLOWAY, NEW JERSEY | Five minutes in, they never thought about it again. And according to Beth Hutter, the Golf Channel producer who put together the first all-female golf broadcast team in U.S. history for last week’s ShopRite LPGA Classic, “two minutes in, the viewer forgot about it, if they realized it at all. If nobody brought attention to it, people would (have) tuned in and not ever blinked.”
Whether or not you realized that every voice you heard on air last week during the coverage of the LPGA Tour was female, the moment is worth noting. Also worth a mention is the fact that, like most weeks, two young women behind the scenes, Maria St. Onge and Ariana Savich, developed all the graphics. And Hutter, as always, was the behind-the-scenes general, the voice in every ear of those reporting on course or in the booth. She is the person in the compound (a tucked-away village of single-wide trailers and trucks) who stares at 20 or so monitors and directs every shot, every graphic and every voice you hear. Hutter is the scene-setter, the storyteller, the genius behind one of the toughest jobs in all of sports – producing golf with a handful of cameras and an overworked crew.
“I started in 1999 with Golf Channel,” Hutter said. “I did (the Korn Ferry Tour) for a couple of years and started producing LPGA (Tour coverage) full time in 2006.
“About two years ago, I had seen the NHL do an all-female broadcast and I thought, we’ve got females in all of these roles. We’d just never put them on the same show. We’ve had females do play-by-play. We’ve had female analysts. We’ve had female hole announcers and female on-course announcers. It’s nothing new for anybody. It was just scheduling everybody for the same week. Finally, their schedules panned out and we were able to pull it off.”
It’s not totally accurate that everyone on the broadcast had done this job before. Cara Banks, a studio host for years, stepped in and did play-by-play. She was joined by Judy Rankin as the lead analyst and Paige Mackenzie, who provided additional analysis. On the course, major champion Karen Stupples was joined by Kay Cockerill.
"I just think it’s cool that we could do it because we have so many talented female announcers that we could put them all together and not miss a beat.”
Beth Hutter
“You are used to hearing these voices for years,” Hutter said. “Kay and Paige were just at the Ryder Cup. You’ve been hearing Judy for years. We’ve just never heard them all on the same show. For me it’s nothing new. And it’s nothing new for them, either. I just think it’s cool that we could do it because we have so many talented female announcers that we could put them all together and not miss a beat.”
Certainly, by the weekend, once the hype of the all-female team was over, nobody noticed.
“I think for all of us, we’ve been doing this for a long time,” Stupples said. “This isn’t our first rodeo in terms of broadcasting. We come here and we do a job. We do it week in and week out to the best of our abilities regardless (of who we’re working with). However, I do feel there’s a nice little special bond between all of us because we have this opportunity to do this. I feel like we’ve all worked together at various stages in various different positions, but we actually can come together as a team for this week and work at this together.
“I feel like we have a nice little bond that will never be broken because we have this shared experience. Moving forward, I would love to see all of us do this at a men’s event, just to throw that out there.”
Women have been calling men’s golf for decades, none better than Rankin, who worked for ABC for many years as an on-course commentator.
“I cannot tell you all the great things that have come about for me because ABC Sports gave me a chance,” Rankin said. “I worked with an awful lot of really wonderful men who pushed me along and helped me. Made me comfortable when I wasn't comfortable at all.
“When I look back, I am really pleased to see that women do the job and are very capable of doing the job, whether it be women’s golf, men’s golf, any kind of golf. We are accepted now and even searched for.”
Hutter’s assessment about viewers not realizing what they were seeing speaks volumes for how long women analysts have been a part of golf. From Marlene Floyd and Mary Bea Porter King to Stupples and Dottie Pepper, golf fans have been hearing women call golf for the better part of a half century. The same isn’t true for sports like football and baseball. If a woman called the Buccaneers-Patriots NFL game Sunday night, people would have noticed. The fact viewers didn’t notice last week says a lot about our game.
“I think we are starting to see some women calling other sports,” Cockerill said. “We've seen Jessica Mendoza in baseball, Hannah (Storm) and Andrea Kramer did football via Amazon. A woman who’s from the Bay Area just got called to do the Philadelphia 76ers, Kate Scott. She’d been working her way up through the ranks doing Pac-12. It’s a novelty at first. But as more and more women do it, hopefully it’ll be more the norm.”
Top: Beth Hutter of Golf Channel
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