AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain Blazes Trail for RSNs With Female Leadership - in the Truck and in the Booth

AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain Blazes Trail for RSNs With Female Leadership - in the Truck and in the Booth Director Erica Ferrero and producer Alison Vigil are at front bench, Jenny Cavnar does play-by-play for selected Colorado Rockies games By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor

Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - 3:51 pm

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This year in sports broadcasting has been notable for historic moments for women in the announce booth. During the baseball season, an Orioles-Rays game on YouTube in July featured the first all-female broadcast crew in MLB history, and, during ESPN's coverage of Padres-Dodgers tomorrow night, Melanie Newman and Jessica Mendoza will make up the first all-female broadcast team to call a national MLB telecast.

From left: AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain Producer Alison Vigil, announcer Jenny Cavnar, and Senior Director Erica Ferrero in the Rockies booth at Coors Field

Having more women calling games is a new and welcome development in the MLB, but it's nothing new for AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain. Not only has Rockies pre/postgame studio host Jenny Cavnar served as play-by-play announcer for selected games on the Denver-based RSN since 2018, but its Rockies broadcasts are led by women at the front bench, with Senior Director Erica Ferrero handling 100+ games and producer Alison Vigil producing 80+ games per season.

SVG sat down with Cavnar, Ferrero, and Vigil to discuss how they got into the industry, how the pandemic has impacted their productions, their core production philosophies, advice they would give other women looking to break into the industry, and how they hope industry opportunities will improve in the future.

From left: AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain's Alison Vigil, Jenny Cavnar, and Erica Ferrero are the first all-female team to call a Major League Baseball game.

How did you get started in the sports-broadcasting industry, and what has your career trajectory been?

Ferrero: I was a computer-science major at UC Santa Barbara, but the drama department was looking for volunteers to shoot their performances, so I [served as] a cameraperson. That was my first exposure. I really liked it, but I thought I'd rather be the person seeing all the cameras so I became interested in directing. I started in news [at KEYT-TV] in Santa Barbara and then in Denver [at KUSA-TV and KCNC-TV]. Then I began directing some sports and eventually ended up directing Rockies games at Fox SportsNet Rocky Mountain. I was lead EVS operator for the Nuggets for a couple of years and have now been back doing the Rockies for 11 years as well as Mountain West Conference football and basketball and some other sports.

Vigil: I went to college for broadcast journalism at Indiana University in Pennsylvania and definitely always wanted to be some sort of journalist. I ended up interning at the NBC [affiliate] in Philadelphia and didn't love the news world, so I started exploring the sports side of things. I worked some preseason Eagles games, and it felt like a dream come true. I got lucky being in the right place at the right time and moved to Denver to work with FSN Rocky Mountain as they were starting their news broadcasts. I also have three kids so I took a bit of a hiatus, but I've now been with the Rockies for almost 15 years.

Cavnar: I was a business major at Colorado State University but grew up loving sports and always knew I wanted to be a sports reporter. I began working productions for the campus station and also the local radio station and then ended up doing sidelines [reports] for local Colorado State football and got hooked. I bounced around a little and coached lacrosse at UCLA for two seasons but eventually found my way back to TV. My first job was in Flint, MI, and eventually I ended up in San Diego [hosting the pre/postgame shows for] the Padres in 2007. I took the job in Colorado [as Rockies pre/postgame studio host] in 2012, so this is my 10th season covering the Rockies and 15th overall in Major League Baseball.

Jenny Cavnar (left in second row) joins Alison Vigil (foreground) and Erica Ferrero (right) in the truck.

Is there one core philosophy or goal you go into each game production with?

Vigil: I am a storyteller at heart. It's so important to me to tell the backstories of how these players have gotten to where they are today, their family support and their background. I always pride myself on being able to find those types of things. Anything I can do to further the story on what makes a player or a coach so special is very important to me.

Ferrero: 2020 was really difficult for me because I love [to show] fans in the stands. [San Francisco Giants director] Jim Lynch was very much a mentor for me, and it's very much his style to bring a humanity to the game. I love to bring people to the game, and it was tough not having fans in the stands last year.

I also love showing players talking and hanging out in the dugout, and the pandemic made that very hard because players were all masked up and not sitting next to each other. Obviously, my first job is to cover what is happening between the lines, but I also like to bring more of a humanity to [the broadcast] so you see things that you wouldn't see if you were at the game. That's always my goal: to show at least one funny or interesting moment that goes outside what's taking place between the lines.

Cavnar: I have the same philosophy [doing play-by-play] that I do when I go on-air, and that's connecting with the audience. The audience can be so different: some people are watching a baseball game for the first time and others know all the ins and outs of the game. So we have to make sure that we're bringing not only all the statistics and analytics to the table but also the storytelling. If we can relate to [the casual viewer

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2021/09/28/att-sportsnet-rocky-mountain-bl...
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