04/11/26 Blair County Sports Hall of Fame Induction.
Hannah Storm speaks
Hannah Storm has vivid reminiscences of the feedback directed towards her as one of the few ladies working in sports activities media when her profession was in its early levels.
“As I was leaving college and looking for jobs, the feedback was, ‘The audience doesn’t want to hear a woman talking about sports, or my sports director doesn’t want to work with a woman, or I’ll hire a woman over my dead body,’” Storm recalled. “That was a good one. It’s really hard to imagine that sort of thing being said today, but I got to be honest, back in the early ’80s, that’s what people were saying.”
Storm, relaying some of these experiences Saturday night when she was the visitor speaker on the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame dinner on the Blair County Convention Center, heard a lot totally different suggestions after she and Andrea Kremer spent 4 years collectively as the one feminine broadcasting group masking the NFL.
The duo referred to as Thursday night time soccer video games for Amazon.
“There was a student at LaSalle who said when one of our producers was playing clips of our broadcast, the producer said, ‘How does it sound?’” Storm stated. “The student said it just sounded normal. I thought that was great. Two women just talking football sounded normal. I think that was a really great moment for me.”
For Storm, an instrumental determine in sports activities broadcasting as the primary girl to do play-by-play for the NFL for a whole season, the primary play-by-play voice for the WNBA, the primary girl in American TV historical past to be the primary community host of a significant league sport and the primary feminine host of NCS Sports Tonight, the developments and alternatives are uplifting.
The 2026 Blair County Sports Hall of Fame class included Lori (McConnell) Elgin, a Bishop Guilfoyle standout who was the primary ladies basketball participant from Blair County to earn a Division I scholarship; Cathy (Cronin) Beam, who grew to become the primary official to be inducted; former Duquesne standout Kristi (Litte) Kaack; and members of the 1995-96 Altoona Area High School ladies basketball groups, which received back-to-back PIAA championships.
“My message to the inductees is basically thank you,” Storm stated. “Thank you for being pioneers. I’m so excited there are so many female inductees this year. I have female empowered sayings on my dress like ‘She is fierce.’ I think being the first to do what I do and then be in the room with people who are of the same ilk is really inspiring to me.”
Storm, a pioneer herself, detailed some of the derisive feedback or attitudes she encountered, together with being employed at a tv station in Charlotte as a “gimmick” to have a lady do sports activities on the weekends; being blocked by undressed gamers in locker rooms from leaving; and taking a sports activities quiz as a situation of hiring that notably her husband, Dan Hicks, didn’t should take when he was employed on the identical outlet only a week later.
Storm recalled throughout her keynote speech that Charles Barkley, then with the Houston Rockets, questioned whether or not she was certified as a lady to debate the NBA when she served as NBC’s studio host throughout the NBA finals. Shortly thereafter, when the WNBA launched, Barkley and Storm have been on set collectively.
“So I asked him if, as a man, he felt qualified to talk about the WNBA,” Storm stated, including that the 2 are actually shut pals.
“Sports is for everybody,” Storm stated earlier than her speech. “It’s not some secret language only a few people can speak. I don’t think those attitudes are very prevalent anymore, but I did encounter some of that along the way.”
Former native ladies basketball coach Deb Yesenosky, who was current partially to help Beam, referred to as Storm’s speech “phenomenal,” and stated it capped a “super night.”