SVG is profiling this year's 10 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame inductees in the weeks leading up to the ceremony on Dec. 13 at the New York Hilton. For more information, visit sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org.Trailblazer. Pioneer. Groundbreaker. Throughout Andrea Berry's decades-long career in sports broadcasting, these descriptors have been attributed to her time and time again, each with excellent reason. Berry blazed a trail as one of the first female tech managers at CBS in the mid '80s, pioneered field operations for Fox Sports in the '90s and 2000s, and continually broke new ground as an African-American woman in a predominantly male industry. And through it all, she has remained one of the most humble, well-liked, and respected people in the business.
Andrea Berry
She was steady, locked in, and she always understood that whatever we did was a collaboration, says Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Jerry Steinberg, who worked with Berry at CBS and Fox Sports. She somehow knew how to put the right moving parts in the right place at the right time, and that's what production's all about. It's a testament to her strength and fortitude: she was always just Andrea. Besides her unique talents, she's a pioneer. She's a pioneer by how she does her job. She cracked the glass ceiling in the television business.
Interestingly, Berry did not initially pursue a career in sports broadcasting but, rather, through a series of fortuitous circumstances, discovered her passion for live television. A native of Chicago, she attended middle and high school in her mother's native Jamaica before returning the U.S. for her senior year, during which she wanted to be an architect and interior designer. After her father encouraged her to pursue engineering instead, Berry decided to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she found an outlet for her love of music and art at the college radio station. She also found a work-study position broadcasting night classes to local companies like Bell Labs and Motorola via satellite.
We would be in a studio at school, and we would just pretty much follow the instructor, Berry recalls. Little did we know at that time that we were doing live TV, little did we know that we were doing microwave transmission, little did we know that we had to be perfect with the audio and the recording. I was just going for it to make the most money for work-study.
But she was hooked. At a college fair during her freshman year, she interviewed for a summer-relief position with NBC affiliate WMAQ-TV Chicago and was offered the job. Over the next four years, she immersed herself in studio operations.
I knew right there that I wanted to be in TV. I had gotten the bug, and there was no turning back, she says. The radio did it for me because I was doing live radio - radio really started the live experience and the high - and, to me, there's nothing better than the high of being on live TV.
As she prepared to graduate, Berry accepted a job with CBS in New York to become a management trainee within its studio system. After completing the trainee program, she became manager of the graphics group supporting both studio and field operations and quickly realized that her calling lay in the latter. At 24, she embarked on a 10-year career in the field for CBS in New York, taking on such roles as NFL coordinator and MLB co-coordinator and even scoring a trip to the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway.
The cool thing about CBS is that I created a family, says Berry. I grew up there, and the people that I spent time with were masters in this business, and so I learned from the masters on the production side and on the technical side.
After a decade in New York, she was asked to return to Illinois to become the director of technical operations for the CBS affiliate in Chicago. Soon, however, she was recruited to join the nascent Fox Sports and, in 1996, left Chicago for Los Angeles, becoming part of the team that launched Fox Sports Net (FSN).
The work of broadcasting sports is [as much] a team endeavor as many of the competitions we cover. Leadership of those teams is something that very few have done with the [same] grace, competence, compassion, and enthusiasm as Andrea, says Jerry Gepner, formerly of CBS Sports and Fox, who recruited her to the West Coast. She inspires those who work for her to go beyond their own preconceived limits, which is the ultimate job of a leader. Her management style is based on walking the walk, not just talking the talk. People like Andrea are rare, and I count myself as very fortunate to know her and to have worked with her.
Berry is perhaps best-known in the industry for her 20 years at Fox, during which time she served as VP of field operations, FSN, overseeing operations for NFL, NASCAR, MLB, boxing, NCAA, and much more; SVP of broadcast media services, Fox Networks Group, responsible for all broadcast operations and transmission supporting both the Fox broadcast network and the cable entities; and SVP of broadcast media services, Fox Networks Group, managing all aspects of digital-media management for Fox, the Fox Sports Media Group, and the Fox Networks Group.
The great thing about Andrea is, she brings this essence of calm and confidence to any production, says Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer David Hill. There's a line in Rudyard Kipling: If you can keep your head when all about you, are losing theirs, and blaming it on you.' Andrea, despite whatever was going on, always kept her head. The ultimate professional, she understands the pressures on everyone. She gets the philosophy of what a production is, how it should be done; she's unbelievably creative she's a perfectionist. And working with her was one of the great joys of my life.
Despite retiring
