In the big leagues of sports media
ESPN senior editor Aimee Crawford’s determination, preparation propel her to leadership roles in male-dominated sports writing field
by Hallie Hart
Photo by Joe Faraoni / ESPN Images
After Mark McGwire cranked a record-shattering line drive narrowly over the left-field wall at Busch Stadium, Aimee Crawford had to run.
Crawford, a writer for The Sporting News, donned business attire and heels, but the shoes couldn’t stop her from racing down to the bullpen. She had to figure out who caught the baseball that might as well have been a winning lottery ticket dropped into someone’s hands. It was Sept. 8, 1998, and McGwire’s fourth-inning solo shot against the rival Chicago Cubs brought his season home run count to 62, surpassing Roger Maris’ historic MLB record.
At first, Crawford didn’t know whether a lucky person had claimed the ball or if it was waiting somewhere just beyond the fence. She solved the mystery when she tracked down Tim Forneris, the St. Louis Cardinals grounds crew member who grabbed the prized item and, despite its high value, returned it to McGwire. Twenty-two years later, Crawford reflected on her mad dash down to the field, her own athletic achievement on that historic day.
“I remember thinking it was quite a feat,” Crawford said. “…I ended up getting (Forneris) and getting to tell his story, which was really exciting. It was definitely a career highlight for me as a fan and as a journalist.”
Now, instead of scrambling through stadiums to reach sources, Crawford balances two jobs that give her a different view of the writing process. Her various experiences as a sports reporter, from the challenging moments to the fun memories, prepared her to work as a senior editor at ESPN and an adjunct professor at Central Connecticut State University. Whether she is meeting with high-profile ESPN writers or the student journalists who admire them, she doesn’t forget how demanding the life of a reporter can be.
“We’re not just sitting here crafting beautiful prose at our laptop,” Crawford said. “There’s a lot of work that goes into coming up with an idea, reporting that, finding sources, all this sort of prewriting, and so I try to be mindful of that as an editor.”
Crawford’s writing and editing careers have also shown her what it’s like to work as one of a few women — or sometimes the only woman — in newsrooms, media scrums and conference rooms. As of 2018, men held 90% of sports editing jobs and 88.5% of sports reporting positions in media organizations affiliated with Associated Press Sports Editors, according to research from Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
Despite the low percentages of women in many sports departments, an Associated Press article stated that the report lauded ESPN’s employment practices. Although Crawford is occasionally still the one woman in a group of men, she said ESPN’s staff has greater diversity than any other group of coworkers she has had.
“I think it’s super important to have women and people of color represented in every facet of what we do,” Crawford said. “And I feel like we still have some work to do on that front, but I do feel like there is a concerted effort to make sure that we are hiring diverse voices and working with new writers with new perspectives and bringing editors into the fold who bring those diverse perspectives as well.”
As an aspiring sports journalist, Crawford quickly realized she was stepping into a male-dominated field.
During her freshman year of college at Oklahoma State, she visited the newsroom that housed the student paper, which was then called The Daily O’Collegian, and proclaimed that she wanted to write about sports.
Not one woman joined her.
But Crawford accomplished her goal, providing the campus community with coverage of teams that reached success. First, she wrote about the softball team, a regular Women’s College World Series contender, and then she followed the Cowboy basketball squad as it advanced far into the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Throughout her time as the sole woman in the sports department, Crawford had positive experiences and tough moments.
“I felt like in every press conference, any time I was in a locker room or at a press conference or covering games, I stood out, but sometimes that helped,” Crawford said. “There were ways that it was a lot of pressure. I’ve always felt that I had to be super prepared, perhaps more so than some of my colleagues, to ask questions, to anticipate, but it was good to be prepared.”
Crawford acquired the skills to cover a variety of sports, but she longed to work professionally as a baseball beat reporter. She called baseball her first love, and as she pursued degrees in journalism and French, she was intrigued with her academic adviser’s suggestion to live in Canada and write about the Montréal Expos.
That plan never materialized –– the Expos eventually relocated to Washington, D.C., and rebranded as the Nationals –– but Crawford’s career kept her close to America’s pastime. After obtaining a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, she secured a job at The Sporting News, aka “The Bible of Baseball.”
There, Crawford no longer stuck out as the lone female sports journalist. Leslie McCarthy and Cindy Boren, two of her coworkers, passed their wisdom on to her, showing her that her ambitions could become reality.
“I had these big visions of what I wanted to do,” Crawford said. “And they had both been in the industry as editors, and they were enormously helpful, guiding me both professionally and personally.”
As Crawford gained experience, also working for Sports Illustrated, MLB.com and People magazine before joining ESPN, her goals evolved.
“I’ve always felt that I had to be super prepared, perhaps more so than some of my colleagues, to ask questions, to anticipate, but it was good to be prepared.”
During her early days at The Sporting News, she communicated with the correspondents who worked on MLB beats, and this opened her eyes to their exhausting lifestyles. They were constantly on the road, and they couldn’t slow down until their teams’ 162-game schedules ended.
Although Crawford covered baseball games, including McGwire’s historic night at Busch Stadium, she decided not to become a beat reporter. Still, she had to make sacrifices for work. During busy sports seasons, she and her husband, then-NBA reporter Rob Peterson, couldn’t spend much time together.
“We were like ships passing in the night because the baseball season would end in late October, just as the NBA season was starting,” Crawford said. “…I think that was part of my realization that my future and what I wanted to do was to travel less, to be an editor and to actually occasionally see my husband.”
Crawford expected to enjoy more time with him, but she didn’t predict they would eventually share a workplace as editors for different organizations.
Crawford and Peterson, an NBA editor for The Athletic, have been working from home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the past few months, Crawford’s days have been packed with Zoom meetings.
In the spring, when sports across the nation came to a halt, Crawford and her fellow staff members had to find innovative ways to provide readers with fresh content despite the lack of new game stories. When leagues resumed play, videoconferences often replaced media scrums because of social distancing protocols, but Crawford praised ESPN’s writers for their abilities to handle the limitations.
“I work with some wildly creative people,” Crawford said. “Not just in terms of the ideas that they come up with, but their solutions to challenges like, ‘How do we tell a story when the only access we can get to an athlete is a Zoom call?’ And I’ve been so impressed by many of the writers I work with in terms of the ingenuity that they’ve shown or ways that they’ve found to get at stories.”
Although she has a leadership role in a colossal sports media organization, Crawford never forgets where her journalism career started. She still has her textbooks, and sometimes, she looks back at her coursework from OSU.
“In fact, I’ve showed my students (at CCSU) one of the first assignments that I didn’t do as well as I expected,” Crawford said, “and just showed them what a learning experience these kinds of things can be. And those lessons will stick with you even as you move on if you pursue journalism as a profession.”
No textbook or assignment could provide her with an instruction manual about navigating the sports industry as a woman, but with extensive preparation and experience, Crawford has taught herself. As a member of the Association for Women in Sports Media, she continues to be an advocate for female sports journalists, even making an agreement with one woman that they will reinforce each other’s points in meetings and interview settings to ensure their voices are heard.
The heels Crawford wore while she hurried through Busch Stadium might serve as a symbolic example of the extra expectations women in sports media often face, but the pressure hasn’t held her back.
As Crawford reminisced on writing the sidebar about Forneris, she pondered a question. If he could go back in time, would he give the ball back or hold on to it? Perhaps it would be a good idea to ask him, she mused.
She’s an editor, but her reporting instincts remain strong.