Erin Andrews is one of the most recognizable faces in all of sports journalism. But have
you ever wondered what the former Dancing With the Stars co-host was like when she's
not out on the court with a mic in her hand? Here's how she got to where she is today.
Born to a journalist father and a teacher mother, Erin Andrews and her family relocated
from Maine to the Tampa Bay area, where her father had landed a new job, when she was
a young girl.
Her father, Steve Andrews, was well known in the area because of his work as an Emmy-award-winning
investigative reporter for local television station WFLA News Channel 8. For some people,
he's perhaps even more well known than his famous daughter. As Andrews told Tampa Magazine,
"My dad is recognized here more than I am."
However, that doesn't mean that Andrews isn't recognized when she returns to her old stomping
grounds. Far from it! That's because sports are very popular in the region, almost to
the point that it's like a religion. According to Andrews, quote, "I can't go inside a college
sports bar. It gets pretty obscene."
But long before she was a pillar of sports journalism, Andrews was just a young girl
with big dreams living in Florida with her family.
It would seem that Erin Andrews was destined to fall in love with sports from the very
beginning, as they were practically woven into her DNA. She recalled in an interview
with Elle,
"I grew up a daddy's girl. My dad loved sports, and I used to sit on the couch with him and
learn about his favorite teams."
That included not just learning everything she could about the players, but also the
coaches, past and present games, and the various team traditions.
But Andrews' passion for sports didn't translate into an urge to play herself. As she continued,
"I never played sports. I was always a spectator, but it was something I really loved doing."
"All I wanted to do was talk sports. Friday nights, when all my girlfriends were out at
movie theaters with their boyfriends, I was at our friend's house down the street watching
the Chicago Bulls."
After a while, she also became a huge fan of the sports broadcasters she would see on
television, including the female journalists. Suffice to say, her life's path was becoming
very clear.
Fortunately for Erin Andrews and many others, high school doesn't last forever. So once
Andrews finished up her senior year, it was time for her to figure out her next step,
which was a no-brainer for her. She was off to Gator country at the University of Florida.
She explained to Southern Living, quote, "I knew I wanted to go into sports broadcasting,
and Florida had a great journalism program."
But that wasn't the only reason that Andrews went to that school. Lots of schools have
good journalism programs, but only one school has the Florida Gators. As she put it,
"It may sound silly, I wanted to go to a school with a winning football program. I knew ESPN
would be covering strong teams and I wanted to see that coverage up close."
Andrews graduated from UF with a bachelor's degree in telecommunications in 2000. Seven
years later, she was honored with the University of Florida's Outstanding Young Alumni Award.
It's not always easy to be a recent college graduate looking for work. But luckily enough
for Erin Andrews, she was able to land a super exciting job in 2001, less than a year after
graduation. She was hired as a rink-side hockey correspondent for the Tampa Bay Lightning.
At the outset, however, things didn't seem so rosy, as the team had just hired a brand
new coach, who she says prioritized rebuilding the team over cultivating a relationship with
the media. As Andrews shared in a chat with the Tampa Bay Times,
"He was working with one of the worst teams in the league. It had been awful, and he was
trying to get them to pay attention and didn't want any distractions."
Fortunately Andrews was able to prove just how good she was, winning the respect of both
the coach and the team as a whole. Though it was far from guaranteed, the experience
ended up being a positive one. According to Andrews,
"It could have been just a really rough go for me. They were so welcoming and wonderful
to me."
Once Erin Andrews learned the ropes of sports reporting for the Tampa Bay Lightning, she
felt right at home. Not only was she good at asking the tough questions, but she also
got close to the coach of the team, who became a mentor to her. So when Andrews received
an invitation from Turner Sports in 2002 to report on hockey and baseball in Atlanta,
she found herself in a tough position. It was an offer she couldn't refuse.
Distraught, Andrews called her parents to solicit their advice. Ever the sage, her father
reminded her that reporting on the national level was a smart next step for her career,
regardless of the attachment she may have had to the gig she already had. So before
the hockey season was over, Andrews tearfully tendered her resignation.
After two years with Turner, with no renewed contract in hand, Andrews pitched herself
to ESPN. The network eventually ended up offering her a long-term contract after she showed
them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she had what it takes to be great.
In 2008, Erin Andrews would have to go through perhaps the most difficult, traumatizing experience
of her life. When she was staying in a hotel, a man filmed her while she was nude and uploaded
the video to the internet. Naturally, when Andrews found out about the violation, and
that the video of her undressed had been spread across the internet, she was horrified.
"I was freaking out so much that when I called my parents, my dad thought I had been injured
in a car accident cause I was just screaming bloody murder on the other end."
In that moment, not only was she horrified to learn about what had happened to her but
also what the fallout from the incident might be.
"Honestly, the first thing I said was, 'My career is over, I'm done. Nobody's ever going
to take me seriously again.'"
In the end, the perpetrator pleaded guilty and served more than two years in jail for
his offenses. Years later, in 2016, Andrews was also awarded $55 million in a civil lawsuit
that she filed against the perpetrator, as well as the owner and management company of
the hotel in which the crime occurred, a bittersweet victory after an invasive violation that never
should have happened.
Despite the horrific events of 2008, Erin Andrews' career was not over as she had initially
feared, far from it.
In fact, just a few years later in 2012, she accepted a new gig over at the Fox network,
continuing her ascent in the world of sports journalism. Speaking in an interview with
Shape after the announcement was official, Andrews said,
"I think I'm most excited about the new opportunities and a chance to expand my role, and just really
challenge myself and get better."
As Andrews tells it, she didn't have any issues with her previous employer, so that wasn't
the motivation for her move. According to her, quote, "I was very comfortable and very
happy with where I was for the last eight years with ESPN. But this is a chance for
me to just get better."
You have to admire her ambition!
That's not all, either, as it was only a couple of years after that that Andrews was given
another opportunity: In an unexpected move, it was announced that she would begin working
as a co-host on the widely popular reality show Dancing with the Stars, diversifying
her career and solidifying her status as a crossover celebrity.
Erin Andrews may be passionate about her work and driven to succeed professionally, but
that doesn't mean she has no time for love. So when her now-husband, former NHL player
Jarret Stoll, popped the big question to her at Disneyland in 2016, she was absolutely
thrilled.
"We went there for Christmas to see the Christmas decorations, and we had a lovely dinner there
and he did it right there at dinner at Disneyland, yes."
"He got on the knee."
She then proceeded to start, quote, "bawling like a child", a reaction which, in this case,
is pretty sweet.
Erin Andrews has always done her best to be as healthy as possible. But despite her best
efforts, Andrews was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016, which hit her completely out
of the blue. But rather than take time off to get the treatment she needed, she soldiered
through work with a serious poker face.
She explained in an interview with InStyle,
"Being on my feet for about seven hours at a time was very hard, physically. But what
was even harder was that, because I work with a bunch of men, I didn't want to act like
I was sick."
Understandably, she didn't want to be perceived as weak or incapable in front of her co-workers,
however unfair that would have been. It made for a challenging time in her life which,
she said, was quite exhausting.
Fortunately Andrews was able to beat the cancer, which she happened to learn while she was
backstage with her team at Dancing with the Stars. As she recalled,
"The doctor said, 'You're good to go, and I'll see you in six months for a checkup,'
and it was a ton of relief."
Although she fortunately survived the frightening diagnosis and treatment, the brush with a
serious medical issue spurred some reflection in Andrews' personal life.
She recalled in an interview with Health.com,
"If anything, it was a huge step for my relationship with my boyfriend at the time. We hadn't even
been discussing marriage. We hadn't discussed babies!"
With the cancer posing a threat to her reproductive health, the couple naturally had a reason
to finally have those conversations.
Though Andrews had chosen to freeze her eggs in the past, she and her husband then decided
to undergo in-vitro fertilization and also have her embryos frozen. That way, if and
when they do decide to have a child, the option will be on the table. As Andrews bluntly put
it,
"I'm not young, we don't know when we're gonna have a baby, we don't know if this is going
to come back."
No matter what decisions she makes in the future, we wish her and her family all the
best.
In 2020, in a move that shocked fans of Dancing with the Stars, co-hosts Erin Andrews and
Tom Bergeron were both dismissed from their jobs, according to a report by Deadline.
Given that Bergeron had been on the show since its inception in 2004 and that Andrews had
been there since 2014, it makes sense that viewers were more than a little surprised
to see them go.
Rather than make waves or publicly decry the fact that she'd been let go, Andrews instead
was a total class act. After the news broke, she wrote in a tweet,
"Thank you ABC and the entire Dancing with the Stars family for six memorable seasons.
Those years wouldn't have been as special without my loving host Tom Bergeron, the talented
dancers, and witty judges."
She added that she'll always treasure the memories she made on the show, even if she
claims to have had some difficulties walking in high heels in her glitzy on-camera attire.
No matter what, we can't wait to see where she ends up next.
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