By Josh Langenbacher
Hannah Storm has vivid memories of the comments directed toward her as one of the few women working in sports media when her career was in its early stages.
“As I was leaving college and looking for jobs, the feedback was, ‘The audience doesn’t want to hear a woman talking about sports, or my sports director doesn’t want to work with a woman, or I’ll hire a woman over my dead body,’” Storm recalled. “That was a good one. It’s really hard to imagine that sort of thing being said today, but I got to be honest, back in the early ’80s, that’s what people were saying.”
Storm, relaying some of these experiences Saturday evening when she was the guest speaker at the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame dinner at the Blair County Convention Center, heard much different feedback after she and Andrea Kremer spent four years together as the only female broadcasting team covering the NFL.
The duo called Thursday night football games for Amazon.
“There was a student at LaSalle who said when one of our producers was playing clips of our broadcast, the producer said, ‘How does it sound?’” Storm said. “The student said it just sounded normal. I thought that was great. Two women just talking football sounded normal. I think that was a really great moment for me.”
For Storm, an instrumental figure in sports broadcasting as the first woman to do play-by-play for the NFL for an entire season, the first play-by-play voice for the WNBA, the first woman in American TV history to be the main network host of a major league sport and the first female host of CNN Sports Tonight, the advancements and opportunities are uplifting.
The 2026 Blair County Sports Hall of Fame class included Lori (McConnell) Elgin, a Bishop Guilfoyle standout who was the first girls basketball player from Blair County to earn a Division I scholarship; Cathy (Cronin) Beam, who became the first official to be inducted; former Duquesne standout Kristi (Litte) Kaack; and members of the 1995-96 Altoona Area High School girls basketball teams, which won back-to-back PIAA championships.
“My message to the inductees is basically thank you,” Storm said. “Thank you for being pioneers. I’m so excited there are so many female inductees this year. I have female empowered sayings on my dress like ‘She is fierce.’ I think being the first to do what I do and then be in the room with people who are of the same ilk is really inspiring to me.”
Storm, a pioneer herself, detailed some of the derisive comments or attitudes she encountered, including being hired at a television station in Charlotte as a “gimmick” to have a woman do sports on the weekends; being blocked by undressed players in locker rooms from leaving; and taking a sports quiz as a condition of hiring that notably her husband, Dan Hicks, did not have to take when he was hired at the same outlet just a week later.
Storm recalled during her keynote speech that Charles Barkley, then with the Houston Rockets, questioned whether she was qualified as a woman to discuss the NBA when she served as NBC’s studio host during the NBA finals. Shortly thereafter, when the WNBA launched, Barkley and Storm were on set together.
“So I asked him if, as a man, he felt qualified to talk about the WNBA,” Storm said, adding that the two are now close friends.
“Sports is for everybody,” Storm said before her speech. “It’s not some secret language only a few people can speak. I don’t think those attitudes are very prevalent anymore, but I did encounter some of that along the way.”
Former local girls basketball coach Deb Yesenosky, who was present in part to support Beam, called Storm’s speech “phenomenal,” and said it capped a “super night.”
