Long before Laura Rutledge became the host of ESPN’s “NFL Live” or the SEC Network’s “SEC Nation,” she was a teenager who had to make a huge decision about her future. She’d spent most of her childhood working to become a professional ballet dancer, and as she finished high school, she was on the verge of a career in dance.
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But before she could move to China to dance professionally, Rutledge abruptly decided to follow her parents’ advice and go to college. She took the only job available at the campus radio station, then the adventure really began. During a break from taping shows for ESPN while at SEC media days last week, Rutledge joined “The Andy Staples Show” for an incredible conversation about a career that started almost by accident.
(Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.)
When I cover games, I always have people from the college newspaper, college TV station come up to me, and they say, “How do I how do I get a good job in the sports journalism industry?” And I always say you need to be like this person I know named Laura McKeeman. And they’re like, “Who the hell is Laura McKeeman?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah. It’s Laura Rutledge now.”
That means you’re an OG if you know McKeeman. Well, we didn’t really know you for a long time. And I appreciate you so much.
You must have been a freshman at Florida when we met.
Back in 2007. And then 2008 was when I started covering football a little bit more for the radio station.
We’ve got to talk about that. Because we all see you on “NFL Live,” on “SEC Nation.” You’ve been on the sidelines at various events. (When we met), I was covering Florida for the Tampa Tribune. You were working for the campus radio station. And you had just gotten there. And the story of you getting to the University of Florida just fascinates me because you weren’t going to college initially out of high school. What were you going to do?
It fascinates me, too, because I’m constantly wondering how I even got to this point. I was going to be a professional ballet dancer. And that was what I had worked on for my entire middle school and high school time. And I thought that’s what I’m gonna do. I had gone and studied in China when I was 16 and turned 17 while I was over there. Then I went to a ballet boarding school in D.C. that’s actually a Russian Academy.
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Ballet boarding school. I think I’ve seen that show on Netflix.
Yeah, you probably have. And it probably wasn’t nearly as bad as mine was. But anyway, great times. And then I went back to Orlando for my senior year of high school. I was dancing with the Orlando ballet and trying to audition for companies. I had a couple of contract opportunities. And at the very last minute I decided to just go with my acceptance to UF because I realized, wow, I’m not sure if I want to be a corps dancer — which would be somebody in the back all the time — who would also have to have an extra job to try to make money to even live.
So you would wait tables and dance?
Pretty much.
And by the way, being a professional dancer in any capacity is a full-time job, is a brutally, physically taxing job.
Thank you for knowing that. And that was it. So I really abruptly gave up something that had meant the world to me and that I thought I was going to end up doing as a career.
OK, take me through that decision. Where were you? How did you make it? And was it a long decision? Or was it kind of like a light switch? Like, oh, well, this is what I’m doing now.
Definitely a light-switch moment. But for context, I had been told by my parents, “You have to apply for an in-state academic scholarship in the state of Florida.” We lived in Florida. And so I applied to both Florida State and Florida and wrote essays that had to do with my time dancing and my time in China and my growth that had happened there. That’s actually why, I think, I got into Florida. Because the essay really got their attention. I had taken the ACT. I’m not even sure my test scores were up to par because my focus was on ballet. I ended up getting an academic scholarship. At the time, Bright Futures (the state of Florida’s in-state scholarship program) was a thing. That’s what I was able to go to school on. My parents were not going to pay a full ride to send me to college. It ended up being the day before I had to go ahead and say I’m going to Florida or I’m gonna forgo. And I thought, “What am I doing?” It was a total light-switch moment. This is a weird thing. We had been traveling around doing ballet auditions. And my mom and I had been seeing all these Gator signs everywhere. And I’m like, “Mom, I know. The universe is telling me.” She’s like, “Please go to college.” So that was how it happened.
What is it like as a high schooler in China?
It is unusual. I did Florida Virtual School while I was over there.
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Oh, wow. This is very early virtual school — in 2005 or 2006?
I couldn’t even get internet for a while there because it’s difficult to do. It’s probably easier now. But where I lived, it wasn’t some really fancy area at all. So I lived in an apartment and one of my teachers from Orlando had come over there with me. So I had a little bit of supervision from her. But from 7 a.m. to noon, I would do school in my little room in the apartment, then walk to the Shanghai Theatre Academy, which is where I went and did ballet. And I would do that from noon to 5 p.m. And then I would go back home and then do school again from like 5 p.m. to midnight because of the time difference. I had to get time with my teachers, and they weren’t awake at the other time. So I look back and I think, wow, as a 16-year-old, it required a ton of discipline. But that also was an indicator of something that has helped me so much in this career, because so much of it is based around perfection and trying to achieve perfection, which is not achievable for us human beings. So I think I’ve been conditioned my whole life to sort of shoot for that. And it actually works well on TV.
It’s reps, reps, reps. And you have to shake off a bad one because you have another one right now. When we met, you worked for the campus radio station. So this was WRUF at six bucks an hour?
And I’m not even sure I always got paid, which was my fault, not theirs. But I thought I was making big money.
Then you started moving. What I appreciated most about your college sports career was you were willing to do jobs that a lot of other people wouldn’t have even thought to do. Did you work for Rivals.com?
Yes.
Did you work for Scout.com?
Yes.
You were the one who would be calling the (college football) recruits. “Now, give me your top-five list (of potential schools).” And it’s funny, because in my career, I’ve always covered recruiting. I always felt like it’s an important part of the ecosystem. And so when I got hired at Sports Illustrated, it was as the recruiting writer. Everybody I would run into would say, “Oh, I heard you got hired at SI, congratulations. What are you going to be doing?” Then I’d say I’m covering recruiting and they’d be like, “Oh.” When you were doing that stuff, it was not, “I’m here holding the microphone, and you’re talking.” It is, “I am doing stories on you guys. I need to know where you’re going. I need to know who you’re visiting this week.” And it was real shoe-leather reporting. How much did that kind of inform what you do now — especially the sideline stuff? I was talking to people who work sidelines, and that baffles me how you can in 29 seconds do an entire interview.
Going back to the recruiting side of things, the way that that happened was Steve Russell, who is still at WRUF, was so impactful to me at that time. He said, “Listen, if you’re going to make it in this, you need a niche.” He said, “You’re not going to just be like everybody else and make it, so you need to find your niche.” And I realized that at that time, in the 2008-to-2010 range, college football recruiting was booming. And people were really becoming interested.
People were paying for it at the time. At the time, newspapers couldn’t figure out how to monetize any coverage on the internet. But recruiting sites had it down pat.
They were killing it. And so people were looking for reporters in that world. I realized there wasn’t much of a female presence there. It’s more of the scouting side of football. So I was teaching myself from the ground up basically. And the way that I learned was going up and down the state (of Florida). I would drive up and down the state. And I would go to the seven-on-seven camps. And I would talk to the coaches and talk to the players and learn. Some of the things I did during that time are probably not advisable. I would drive. I would go to see high school football, then drive all night back to Gainesville. Sometimes, depending on where I had gone, I would stop in a car dealership to sleep for a little bit because I figured no one would suspect a parked car in a car dealership. It wouldn’t be safe to really park in a gas station. But that’s what it took because I knew if I was going to get there, it was going to have to be putting in those hours. I felt like I needed the experience. I needed to keep learning.
But you brought up a really good point about the unique skill of being on the sideline. And that was something that I was able to sort of hone during that time, too. I did a lot of internet broadcasts of high school football games. And so the great thing was nobody could actually see them or find them, which was amazing considering how poorly I was doing. The very first game, they were going to pay me $300. They came to give me the check afterward. And I said, “I don’t even think I can accept this because I was so bad.” I was so hard on myself. I felt like it was awful. But sideline reporting, you have to get reps in order to understand what you’re seeing on the sideline, understand what works, figure out how to get in really fast and get back out, do the interviews when the coach is running.
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I didn’t know you were Miss Florida until I’d known you for years.
That one gets brushed over, which is all good. It was accidental anyway.
You never brought it up. You never mentioned it. It was like it was Laura, the recruiting writer, is Miss Florida?
It was truly an accident. It only happened because I was trying to win scholarship money because I needed extra money to keep trying to help my parents pay everything off. I ended up over my time in the Miss America system winning about $40,000. So it’s great.
You started off not going into sports. When you showed up at the radio station, that was the job that was open, right?
I thought I grew up on NPR. I loved “Car Talk.” I listened to Garrison Keillor growing up.
I thought, well, surely they’ll have something open on the news side. And I love storytelling. And I wanted to do something media-related. Although I had no idea what I wanted to do because I thought I wanted to be a ballerina. And they said, “Well, we have an opening and it’s in sports.” I thought, I’m not really sure what I know about sports. So this is gonna be interesting.
Was the first job out of college at CNN?
The first job was the Tampa Bay Rays pre- and postgame, which happened kind of randomly. I had been beating everybody’s door down for an internship and could never get an internship with ESPN, Fox, ABC, any of those places. So it was actually great because I got a ton of real experience at smaller places. But finally, Fox Sports Florida let me come in and do a summer internship (during the) summer of my junior year. So going into my senior year. And all I did the whole time was copy DVDs. And I thought, what a waste of time. I sat there and ate Mike and Ikes and copied DVDs. So then they were looking for somebody because they had a contract issue with their reporter who was going to be doing their pre- and postgame stuff. And they said, “Oh, didn’t you want to be on air?” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, I do.” And they said, “Well, you worked really hard.”
I wrote a bunch of position previews for Florida and Florida State football during that time. I’d said, “You have no content on your website. So why don’t you put these on there? If you don’t want to, that’s all good. I’m going to write them anyway.” When I got to the Florida State DBs and the Florida special teams, I thought: Why did I agree to do this?
But I did that. And I guess it made an impression on somebody. And they said, “Oh, yeah, we’ll put you on TV.” Now. Little did they know, I didn’t even know what an IFB (the device that goes in a TV reporter’s ear that allows the director to talk to the reporter) was. But I showed up on opening day at the Rays’ stadium. So I was terrified. One quick, funny story. If you look back at the photo of that day, I had a pink shirt on. I had pit stains — nervous sweat pit stains — down to my ribcage.
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But if you show up in a pinch when they need you, boom, you’re in.
There were so many times when you have the urge to say no, you have the urge to say, “Let me give in to the anxiety.” I am freaked out. I don’t even know what an IFB is. I was literally googling IFB on my flip phones to figure out what under the sun they’re talking about. And you look back and you say that could have been a major sink-or-swim moment.
It could have been “Boom Goes The Dynamite.”
I’ve had some Boom Goes The Dynamite things that, thank goodness, have not found public air. But you look back and you make that decision in that moment to say: “I’m gonna try. I’m going to do this. I’m going to figure it out. And somehow I’m going to be prepared.” I still feel like I have a long way to go. But even at this level of big-time shows on ESPN, I am still figuring it out every single day, and there’s still some unexpected thing every day on live TV that I could have never prepared for.
(To listen to the full interview, check out “The Andy Staples Show” wherever you get your podcasts.)
(Top photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
