J-Speaks: Hornets Longtime Broadcaster Going to Virtual Reality

For nearly a decade-and-a-half, a Takoma Park, MD native has provided analysis on as a sideline reporter and for the pregame and postgame as part of the Charlotte Hornets’ television team since the team returned to Charlotte, NC in 2004. Last week though was her last with the franchise as she is leaving for another broadcast opportunity. 

Last Saturday night’s 129-100 loss by the Hornets versus the Los Angeles Lakers was the final broadcast for longtime sideline reporter for the Hornets, formerly the Bobcats Stephanie Ready, which was confirmed in Wednesday’s edition of the Charlotte Observer. 

She will be moving from FOX Sports Southeast, formerly FOX Sports Carolinas to do virtual reality telecasts of NBA games for Turner Sports on a full-time basis. 

Last season, Ready, who Ebony magazine named “The 56 Most Intriguing Blacks of 2001” split her time between doing Hornets telecasts and Turner Sports’ experimental venture in broadcasting NBA games in virtual reality. 

Ready’s career resume also includes doing radio commentary on Furman basketball; doing part-time sideline work for Turner Sports in the 2006 and 2007 NBA Playoffs and the WNBA Playoffs for ESPN 2 in 2006; and sideline reporting during the first and second rounds of the 2006 and 2007 Women’s Final Four of college basketball.  

Ready, who played basketball and volleyball collegiately for the Coppin State University Eagles in Baltimore, MD confirmed to the Observer before the Hornets tilt versus the Detroit Pistons on Wednesday that this would her final week on Hornets telecast.

In that same report, Ready said that she was not yet authorized to discuss her next move in her broadcasting career but spoke very fondly of her opportunity that she received when professional basketball came back to Charlotte 14 years ago. 

“I’ve loved it,” Ready said of her time in Charlotte. “I’ve built so many great friendships and grown so much as a broadcaster. This changed my life-put me on a different path.” 

Before she made a name for herself as a broadcaster, Ready made history as the first woman to coach in a men’s professional league when she was an assistant coach for the now defunct Greenville Groove of the then National Basketball Developmental League (NBDL), now the G-League, the minor league of the NBA. 

After graduating from Coppin State cum laude with a BA in psychology in 1998, where she finished second, fourth, eighth and 10^th on the all-time list in steals, assists, points and rebounds respectably in her four-year career, Eagles’ athletic director Ron “Fang” Mitchell urged Ready to hold off going to graduate school and pursue coaching. 

He hired Ready to coach the women’s volleyball team two weeks before the start of their and the team in her first season snapped a 129-match losing streak. 

At that time Ready was one of the youngest Division I volleyball coaches in the U.S. She was in that position for three years, until she resigned in the spring in 2001. 

Mitchell called Ready to coach again, this time for the Eagles’ men’s basketball team. Ready broke the so-called “glass ceiling” as she joined Jennifer Johnston of Oakland University in Michigan and Bernadette Mattox, who coached at the University of Kentucky from 1990-95 under then coach Rick Pitino as the only women to ever coach Division I men’s college basketball. Ready though was the only one of the three allowed to recruit off campus. 

“It was a no-brainer,” Mitchell told blackvoices.com of the decision to hire Ready. “She’s very detail-oriented and one of the most organized people I’ve had a pleasure to work with.” 

Before Ready resigned from Coppin State in 2001, Mitchell gave her a ringing endorsement to NBDL’s senior director Karl Hicks and Rob Levine, who said to blackvoices.com, “I don’t think the NBDL is constrained by the folks who are going to be skeptics. We want to be a league that breaks old paradigms and provides opportunities. 

Then Groove guard Merl Code said to USA Today about them bringing Ready onto the coaching staff, “We don’t have time to worry about who’s coaching us. Coach Ready is there to help us and we want to let her help us.” 

To Barnes felt Ready was a major help to the Groove as she helped Barnes in putting together the players’ manuals, that included the team’s strategies on both offense and defense as well as team rules. 

The Groove won the NBA D-League championship in what was the first season of the league, but the team folded two seasons later. 

Ready said to Sports News Editor of CNN Jill Martin in an interview back in 2015 that her time with the NBDL prepared her for broadcasting saying, “That experience was a once-in-a-lifetime situation.” 

“Not only because I was so young and starting out in my coaching career—that was the fourth year I had ever coached in any sport—but it taught me a lot about the game of basketball. It taught me a lot about the business side of basketball, and it also just made me tougher.” 

Ready said to the “Sporting News” in an interview on Nov. 1, 2017 that she started to look for ways to stay close to the game that she loved by doing local collegiate games on the radio as well as inquiring information from friends she had on the business side of basketball. She also did some collegiate basketball analysis and sideline reporting for ESPN and she found the opportunity to do something that kept here close the game.

Ready would then take the position of assistant coach in the summer of 2004 for the WNBA’s Washington Mystics. Later in that summer she would get the job that moved her to Charlotte, NC to become the sideline reporter for the expansion Bobcats, for the short-lived regional sports network C-SET, working alongside now Toronto Raptors play-by-play commentator and former NBATV studio anchor Matt Devlin and color analyst Adrian Branch. 

Ready would continue doing broadcast work for the then Bobcats when they change telecast from Spectrum cable to now FOX Sports Southeast. 

Two seasons back, Ready broke another barrier as she became the first woman to be a full-time color analyst for the Hornets. She and her co-pilots for Hornets game in current play-by-play analyst Eric Collins and former standout Hornets sharpshooter Dell Curry became the first African American trio to broadcast games locally for an NBA team. 

“I think it’s amazing, man,” current Hornets forward Marvin Williams said of Ready glass breaking ceiling moment two seasons back. 

Ready was told this summer though that she would be heading back to the sidelines after FSSE made an adjustment to her role as well as hosting “Hornets Live” pregame with Ashley ShahAhmadi and postgame. 

FSSE’s senior vice president Jeff Genthner said to the “Charlotte Business Journal” that moving Ready back to the sidelines and pregame and postgame hosting duties came down to the fact that Ready’s absence from her prior roles left a gap from getting information out the viewing audience of when an injury occurred to a Hornets player or when other breaking news occurred during the game. 

That explanation was not satisfying to Hornets fans who voiced their displeasure on social media through the hashtag #DontSidelineStephanieReady. 

Even host Rachel Nichols of ESPN’s “NBA: The Jump,” which can be seen weekdays at 3 p.m. on the “World Wide Leader in Sports” touched on the happening on her show 

Ready called the response by Hornets fans and what Nichols did in an interview with “Sporting News” on Nov. 1, 2017 “overwhelming” and “humbling.” 

She added “Who knew I’d get chocked up talking about it? It means a lot to me. It’s nice to know that you’re appreciated, that you’re valued. And the fans, I feel like they’re a part of my family, and I think they feel the same way about me. When you’ve been coming into someone’s living room or someone’s kitchen or someone’s barber shop for the last 14 years, and you’re genuine, true self on the air, people get to know you. And it happens all the time in the street. People stop and want to talk and want to take pictures, and I don’t mind that. But to answer your question, it was extremely humbling and amazing to see. It makes your heart warm.” 

Ready also said that to this day her father still laughs and said to her once, “It’s about time you’re getting paid to run that mouth of yours.” 

She added, “I’ve always been a talker, so it’s been a good fit for me.” 

The game of basketball has also been a good fit for Ready’s family in her husband Perry and their two children in son James and daughter Ivy. 

Ready has been a solid as both a great broadcaster and as a mom is from some solid advice she got from her best friend, who is a CEO of her own company, with two kids of her own. 

She said to Ready, “The thing that’s going to help you survive is to be 100 percent in wherever you are. If you’re at work, you’re 100 percent into your work. If you’re with your family, you’re 100 percent into your kids.” 

“You can’t have guilt either way. Because you can get them both ways. That’s helped me a lot.” 

Ready said that she has an amazing life partner in Perry who he calls a saint, a terrific parent, and her biggest cheerleader. She also said that it has helped that her kids have been on this journey with her from the beginning. 

She remembers that when she was first pregnant with her son he would respond to the sound of bouncing basketballs in her womb. 

When Ready would watch video of opposing teams that the now Hornets would play, her kids would used that to their advantage to where they would stay up late and cuddle next to their mom and watch the contest with her. 

“They’re so used to it, and I think a part of it is there generational thing with the devices and screes because I’ve been Face Timing them and Skyping with them since they were babies,” she said. 

“So, seeing mommy on a screen, it’s every day. That’s how they’ve been raised. I have a feeling that it’s gonna hit them at one point that their friends don’t get to their parents on TV when they’re away from work like their mom, but so far, they’ll just sit there and color, build Legos. If they hear something, they’ll be like, ‘Is that mommy?’ Then they’re back to it. Doesn’t faze them.” 

The same can be said for detractors of Ready, though she has not had many of them. For the ones that have said the proverbial a woman’s place is in the kitchen, all that Ready has done is just continued to perfect her craft and appreciate those that have is just give her a chance and she has earned the respect of viewers and of the players and coaches she has interviewed with her knowledge of basketball. 

“She’s played the game,” NBA Hall of Famer and former Hornets assistant Patrick Ewing, who is now the head coach of Georgetown University, his alma mater said three years ago. “She’s done all the work. She done her homework. She’s studied her craft. She’s good at it. That’s the bottom line. She’s good at it.” 

Curry, the father of two-time Kia MVP and three-time champion with the Golden State Warriors Stephen Curry and reserve guard for the Portland Trail Blazers Seth Curry concurred by saying, “Whoever doesn’t think she’s qualified for, come ask me or ask any player or coach in the men’s locker room.” “The know that she’s qualified and she can do the job.” 

That same forward thinking is how many women have been hired in major spots in the four major North American sports, like current MLB analyst for ESPN Jessica Mendoza, who became the first woman ever to call a regular season game back in 2015. San Antonio Spurs’ assistant coach Becky Hammon, who became the first full-time female assistant coach in the NBA and Jen Welter, when she worked with the inside linebackers of the Arizona Cardinals during training camp and the preseason three years ago, and the first woman to hold a coaching position of any kind in the NFL. The NFL also had its first female official in Sarah Thomas back in 2015 as well. 

In the span of nearly two decades, with 14 of them in Charlotte, Stephanie Ready became a trailblazer who showed that it does matter your gender or sex, if you are knowledgeable and willing to be the best at your craft, you can become great at anything you want to. You can also change the minds of few along the way and show others who have those same dreams that it is possible for them to be in the same position or even better. 

Ready said to “Sporting News that she did not know what she would do beyond working for FOX Sports Southeast doing Hornets broadcast. She hoped to one day host a big show and be an analyst. 

As another chapter of Ready’s life closes in her basketball journey that has taken her from Takoma Park, MD, to Baltimore, MD, to Greenville, SC, to Washington, DC to Charlotte, NC and new one begins, the one guarantee that can be set in stone for sure is she will put her best foot forward to be great as an announcer for Turner Sports VR broadcast. 

“That is what my aspirations are,” Ready said when she was moved back to sideline reporting and doing the pregame and postgame for Hornets broadcast. “Being in this role-the change role, I guess-I’m also hosting the show again. I missed that the last two seasons. So, long term, I don’t really know exactly how to answer that question because, especially in broadcasting, there’s so many twists and turns, and so many different ways you could go. I would say 1A and 1B would be hosting a big show and being an analyst.” 

Information and quotations are courtesy of 12/4/15 https://www.cnn.com story, “Stephanie Ready No Stranger to History as NBA’s First Female Full-Time Analyst,” by Jill Martin; 12/1/17 www.sportingnews.com story “Hornets Analyst Stephanie Ready on Moving Back from Booth to Sideline: ‘I was Shocked,’” by Jordan Greer; 12/12/18 https://www.charlotteobserver.com story, “Observer Exclusive: Longtime Hornets TV Personality Stephanie Ready Leaving,” by Rick Bonnell; and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Ready.