What Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer have learned as the NFL’s only all-women broadcast team

Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer made history in fall 2018 when they partnered with Amazon Prime Video to call Thursday Night Football and became the first ever all-woman NFL broadcast team.

The two were well-prepared for the role with more than 70 years in combined broadcast experience. Storm is perhaps best known for hosting ESPN’s SportsCenter after joining the network in 2008, and has also hosted live coverage of tennis and the Olympic games. Kremer has worked as a correspondent for ESPN, the NFL Network, and the CBS Sports Network, where she hosts the all-women weekly sports show, We Need To Talk.

The pair is in the middle of their second season calling games together, and spoke exclusively with SB Nation about the job, including the hardest parts about live commentary, and what it meant to make history in a male-dominated profession.

SB NATION: You all have been calling games together for almost two full seasons now. What were some of the hardest parts about doing this for the first time?

ANDREA KREMER: For all that Hannah and I had done in our long and storied, respective careers, this was not one of the things. So there’s so much to learn in terms of the mechanics of doing it, and really getting a feel for each other because there’s a reason you’re called partners. You really have to work together.

HANNAH STORM: Even though we were very experienced broadcasters, it was just very terrifying at the start in terms of doing something completely different. Using muscles that you hadn’t used before. So maybe it is like a QB who hasn’t played a lot under center going to the NFL, I think that’s probably not a bad analogy.

KREMER: When we started this season, I said to Hannah, ‘We know we can do this.’ When we called our first practice game last year, we didn’t know that. It was funny because I remember our first practice game, halftime, I turned to Hannah and I just looked at her and I go ‘we can do this.’ And again, because it was just so new you really had no idea until you start getting some reps under your belt

STORM: I think that literally, with each game, the learning curve was so huge, and now I think that we feel extremely comfortable. I would say game by game there has been a big learning curve, and we always go back and assess, ‘What can we do better?’ Go back and watch the tape, go back and self-critique, figure out everything from in-game mechanics to how are we preparing the most efficiently, how are we organizing that information — all of those things that go into it.

SBN: I imagine there have to be some nerves before calling a game — how do you all channel those into a broadcast opening?

KREMER: I always say butterflies, nerves, whatever you wanna call them — it’s not bad thing. If you have them, it’s because you care about what you’re doing. It’s how you utilize them. If you let them paralyze you, bad thing. If you let them motivate you and kind of fortify you and energize you, then that’s a good thing.

STORM: I’m a pretty energetic person by nature. There are times when I get nervous. I wouldn’t say [that I do] before these games anymore because I think I’m so prepped up that I’m more excited than anything. Like, ‘Lets get this thing going.’ Everybody will tell you when they’re preparing so long for an event like this over the course of so many days, that clock ticks very slowly until kickoff.

We started something that I think was really great which is, we just start talking over pictures before we get on the air, we just start kind of riffing on different subjects, and we do a whole warm-up. And I just think that’s great because when the game kicks off, you’re kind of in that mode. So that’s one way that we deal with it.

SBN: You two had never worked together before, so what’s that been like getting used to working together professionally?

KREMER: You really need to get along with your partner, the audience senses it. It’s great when I hear, ‘Boy you and Hannah just sounded like you were finishing each others sentences.’ And that truly happens a lot. We’ll be sitting there doing interviews, the respondent will give their answer and then Hannah and I will literally have the same exact follow-up, and it comes out of one of our mouths. And we are often times scarily in sync with our thoughts, and it really pays off.

STORM: I knew that when Amazon said, ‘We want you and Andrea Kremer to do this together, and if the two of you don’t do it we’re actually not going to do it. This is the tandem that we want. We want the two of you to launch this stream.’ And I think knowing it was Andrea and really knowing first-hand what her work ethic was like I immediately was like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel really good about that.’ That for me was like a given.

SBN: To make history as the first all-female broadcast booth to ever call an NFL game is obviously a huge deal. Did you all ever talk about that aspect of calling games?

KREMER: The historical nature of our broadcast booth was obvious — nobody needed to remind us of that. I think the way that Hannah and I are built is, I’ll just speak for myself here, there’s no way that anyone or anything could put more pressure on me than I’m going to put on myself to be the best that I can be, and the best at whatever I set out to do. So we were cognizant of the historic nature, of course, but I think the word is more pride, we had pride in it.

STORM: I think that we both felt a great deal of responsibility that even if there was negative reaction — which there was initially to the announcement — that we had to do it. And I always said to Andrea, ‘If it’s not us, then who? If we don’t say yes, if we don’t take this opportunity, if we don’t take this chance to push ourselves at this point in our careers, how do we know that somebody else is ever going to get this opportunity down the road?’ You have to see it to believe it, you have to have people seeing that we’re doing it understanding that it can be done and wanting to achieve that as a career option. But if it’s never being done, it’s very, very hard to visualize that.

SBN: What have been the most fun or interesting games to call over the last two seasons?

KREMER: You want the games that are really meaningful, and certainly our last game of the season last year, Chargers-Chiefs, had major playoff implications and the Chargers hadn’t won there in so long, and it was a game that really, really came down to the end. That was so thrilling and so exciting. You want the games to be meaningful. I think that’s really the key.

STORM: There are times when bad things happen and you have to excel during those times, and I really felt like with the Browns and Steelers [Myles Garrett and Mason Rudolph] fight, that was something. Listen, the game was over, we’re saying goodbye, we’re giving the credits — ‘Hey see you next week’ — and all of the sudden all hell breaks loose. I think it was quite a bit, it was a lot of video, it was a lot to unpack, it was a lot going on. And I’m actually really proud of the way that she and I handled that.

It’s interesting because I think I have a very good big picture understanding of how to put things in context and my news background is very helpful, and I think covering and hosting a lot of big events gives me a perspective. But I think Andrea being in the trenches for so many NFL games, she understands so many of the nuances of what happens with coaches, with communication, with injuries, with personnel on the field, with detail.

KREMER: You learn that the worst time to evaluate your game is as soon as the game is over, because we tend to focus on if there was one thing that didn’t go the way you wanted. So you should never do that right after the game. There’s just this kind of feeling of, there’s a big exhale but there’s so much energy and so much excitement that you had calling these games. I just remember last year that stood out to me with that one game [Chargers-Chiefs].

SBN: What have been some of the biggest surprises or storylines from the league this season that have stood out to you?

KREMER: It’s the evolution of the young quarterbacks, that to me is the theme of the season. The fact that you’ve had so many signal callers 26 and under that have thrived. Not just doing backup roles, but it’s truly a changing of the guard year, and I think that that’s been really interesting to watch.

Obviously the flip side of that has been a lot of the officiating issues, which you never want that to be bigger than any of these games but something that was intended to clean some things up. I mean you just had to know it was going to open Pandora’s box, and it has.

STORM: Lamar Jackson, he has been a revelation, and the way that Harbaugh has tailored the system to his strengths, I think that what Jackson has done is put an exclamation point on a trend that we’ve been seeing for years in the NFL.

A few years ago we were lamenting, ‘Oh my God all these quarterbacks, all these spread offenses and air raid, they’re not going to be under center, they’re not comfortable in a pro style offense.’ They said that about Dak Prescott, too. And now what we’ve seen is the NFL has adapted to the talent of quarterbacks. Now that is totally flipped, where rather than having the quarterbacks adapt to the league, the league has adapted to the quarterbacks.

KREMER: These are the quarterbacks that are coming out, and then your job as a head coach is to look at your talent and build a system around them that rakes advantage out of those skills. And that’s what you have, so this idea of the pure pocket passer, Eli [Manning] and [Drew] Brees and [Tom] Brady and Philip Rivers to an extent, it’s not just their age, it’s a different kind of offense that we’re seeing out there now. Obviously defenses are hamstrung in a lot of ways — particularly defensive backs, at this point it feels like you could call holding or PI on virtually every play.

So it really really opens up the passing game and I think that it puts a lot more of a premium on these defenses. Teams are just going to run it until you stop it. I want to see longevity. That to me is always a key because you can get certain schemes that — I wouldn’t call them a fad. But to an extent what we’ve seen with the Rams in terms of they were unstoppable, and then give coordinators around the league an entire offseason to break it down and you see what happens.

SBN: What advice would you give young females wanting to call games?

KREMER: Never never never accept ‘no’ for an answer. Because it’s the easier thing for somebody to say no, because if they say yes they have to take another step, so you always want to be, as I like to call it, ‘pleasantly persistent’ in trying to self advocate for yourself, which you need to do.

But understand that reputations are very easy to build, very hard to tear down, and especially being a female in this business that’s everything, it’s really your reputation. I know people want to be liked, and that’s something that’s great to aspire to, but you really want to be respected.

STORM: I always tell students to make sure you know how to write, I think that’s critical. In my job I write all my ‘SportsCenter’ [broadcasts], and I write all my interviews. I understand how to organize thoughts and put stories together. And I think if you [have to] really understand organizationally what’s important and how to prioritize.

Radio, I thought that was really good prep for TV. I know a lot of people that are the greats, that have become TV announcers, have come out of radio. I think it’s a terrific medium. Obviously now when I say ‘radio’ that could be anything — podcasts or what have you. And I think covering as much live work as you can. Not just doing features, not just doing scripted things, I think as much live reps as you can.

KREMER: If you’re passionate about it, and you really have a dream, and you really want to accomplish something, then you have to believe that you’re going to make that happen. You can’t let anybody take that away from you.

To an extent you always have to have some blinders on. Blinders to naysayers and blinders to negativity, and just keep focusing on what it is that you really want to accomplish.