Front and SportsCenter
Michelle Bonner, AS’94, scores a high profile on ESPN.
By Paul Perillo
If you’re a typical sports fan, you look forward to the quality time you spend horizontal in a comfy chair watching ESPN’s SportsCenter.
And maybe once or twice on a Saturday night, you’ve done the mental equivalent of a double take, stared hard at the screen, and thought, Why on earth does that anchor look so familiar?
Well, if you’re in your thirties, it may not be a simple crush, or that glass of beer you had with dinner. It’s possible you sat next to her in literature class.
Since 2005, Michelle Bonner, AS’94, has been working a dream gig, presiding over the SportsCenter desk for several late-night shifts every weekend.
How did she wind up in such a
coveted role at ESPN’s Bristol, Connecticut, studios? Sports reporting is notoriously tough for women to break into. Nobody just falls into that job, right?
Bonner pretty much did. When she arrived at Northeastern in fall 1989, she had a clear idea of her intended career path: major in English; go to law school. A life in sports broadcasting? Not on her docket in any way.
"I had some co-ops at different law firms and was trying to decide which avenue of law to pursue," Bonner explains. "During my junior year, my roommate, who was a journalism major, asked me if I ever thought of becoming a sportscaster." She hadn’t, she says, mostly "because I had no idea how to even go about it."
But Bonner, who had lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire, was a passionate sports fan, especially where the Red Sox and the Celtics were concerned. She was intrigued by the suggestion, even if she didn’t have a clue how to pursue it.
Fortunately, her roommate, an intern at Boston’s WCVB-TV Channel 5, did. She arranged for Bonner to interview for an opening in the station’s sports department. Bonner got it, and was instantly hooked.
"I loved the idea of being around sports all the time," she says. "I took as many related classes as I could and met great professors like Professor [Charles] Fountain [in the School of Journalism]. I logged games, labeled tapes, did some editing, and even went out to do some postgame interviews.
"Soon," she says, "I was producing some morning segments on the weekends, and I decided to make a resumé tape of standups to send out."
At this point, Bonner’s path starts to resemble that of other budding broadcasters. She had jobs at television stations in Charleston, West Virginia; Bangor, Maine; and Manchester, New Hampshire—jobs that allowed her to rack up the big annual salaries, $15,000 to $19,000.
She advanced to larger markets in Houston and Los Angeles. Along the way, she won, in 2001, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Journalism for a feature she did on Marlin Briscoe, who in 1968 became pro football’s first black starting quarterback. Eventually, she returned to Channel 5 in Boston to work on the weekly football show Patriots All Access.
Her old stomping grounds didn’t hold her long. Less than two months later, she made the big leap to the national stage, joining CNN in 2003 to become an anchor for "Headline Sports." She stayed there for about a year before she found what she calls her "perfect job."
"CNN was just not the right thing for me," she says. "Sports was not a priority at the station, and I was looking to do more. Luckily, my agent called ESPN one morning, and they offered me a contract about eighteen hours later."
Bonner signed a four-year deal with ESPN and hasn’t looked back. Her duties include serving as a SportsCenter anchor—she often does the one a.m. shows on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays—as well as working a couple of days a week at ESPNews.
Having Wednesdays and Thursdays off makes for a bit of a crazy schedule, Bonner says. "It’s not exactly ideal for having a personal life. But being such a diehard sports fan makes it a lot easier to handle."
Maybe Bonner spent much of her academic career preparing to argue cases, not introduce highlight reels, but she still looks back fondly on her time on Huntington Avenue.
"I honestly can say I loved college—everything about it," she says. "I loved being in Boston. I can’t say anything negative about the entire experience.
"It’s so good to hear so many positive things about the school lately," she adds, "and it makes me very proud to say I went to Northeastern."
Call it mutual. As Bonner’s own visibility rises, Huskies are doing plenty of bragging about her, too.
Like Your Coverage Live?
Dave Pierce, AS’96, hadn’t seen any Huskies volleyball or men’s soccer action since his days as a Northeastern News cub reporter until he watched both teams play live on September 18.
From his living room in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Pierce is one of the early subscribers of GoNU.TV, a new online pay-per-view service that lets Huskies fans watch games and archived video features on their computers.
Launched August 28 by the Department of Athletics, GoNU.TV is modeled on successful pro-sports websites, such as Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV and the National Basketball Association’s NBA.TV.
“It’s not that long ago I had to search through the tiny print in the sports pages to find any information about some Northeastern teams,” Pierce says. “The fact that I now can sit here with a laptop and watch a soccer game at Parsons Field or a volleyball game at Cabot Gym is pretty unbelievable. It’s definitely giving me a chance to follow the teams like never before.”
Last season, Northeastern experimented with live webcasts for football, hockey, and basketball games. According to Mark Harris, assistant director of the fan-focused Husky Athletics Club, the response was very strong.
“We quickly learned the more [live] events we could put out there, the better,” Harris says. “It’s been a big hit with parents who want to watch their kids play and alums who have left the area but still want to follow our teams. We’re trying to do as many events as we can.”
Northeastern has teamed with Pack Network, a start-up founded by K. J. Cardinal, AS’03, in an attempt to make the webcast productions more closely aligned with traditional television.
“When you watch sports on TV, there are certain elements of a broadcast you take for granted, like the score and the game clock being on the screen at all times,” Cardinal says. “With most of the college webcasts out there these days, you lose those elements. You also usually only have one camera. For the Northeastern webcasts, we’ve tried to incorporate the elements fans are used to seeing, and multiple cameras and angles, to make a better experience for the viewer.”
With students serving as production crew and the voices of Northeastern radio broadcasters providing audio, the university has already engineered live webcasts for football, soccer, volleyball, and field hockey this fall, and plans to cover all home basketball and hockey games this winter. Select additional events in the works include swim meets and perhaps even crew races.
Those wishing to view the webcasts must have a high-speed Internet connection and Apple’s free QuickTime Player. A GoNU.TV subscription costs $59.95 for the season, or $4.95 per event. All the events are archived, allowing subscribers to log in and watch them again or cue up a key moment in a game.
During the first two weeks after the site launched, almost a hundred people purchased a season pass, Harris says. The service has also been a success with opposing teams’ fans. When the Northwestern State football team from Natchitoches, Louisiana, visited Parsons Field, some fifty of its fans paid $4.95 to watch the game, says Harris.
To complement all the live event coverage this season, GoNU.TV plans to introduce a coaches’ show and begin offering highlight clips as well.