from Sam Donnellon of Philly.com,
So, you don’t like hearing a woman broadcasting your major sporting events?
Well, dude, you must have had a particularly bad weekend, because a woman was involved in almost every major sport televised over several major channels.
That’s nothing new at the Kentucky Derby, and the voice of Doris Burke has become increasingly familiar to fans of the NBA, opening a portal that people such as Kara Lawson have since passed through. Former Olympic and Stanford softball standout Jessica Mendoza has also continued her analytical work on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
The NHL on NBC? That voice you hear, if you have tuned into any of the second-round games between the Nashville Predators and Winnipeg Jets, belongs to 42-year-old AJ Mleczko, a former U.S. Olympic gold-medal defenseman-forward from Harvard who is somehow balancing the demands of raising four children ages 6 to 14 with a new career that she wasn’t exactly seeking....
“In all honesty, I don’t think of her as a woman broadcaster at all,” said Brian Boucher, the former Flyers goaltender who works at ice level as the other member of the team. “She’s up there, it’s like I’m doing a game with Eddie Olczyk. She’s an accomplished hockey player. I look at her as just another hockey mind. And that’s how I approach it.”
Said Mleczko: “Nobody treats me like I shouldn’t be there, or even that I am any different.”
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