ESPN Analyst – Stephania Bell

Stephania Bell

Tell us the best part of your job. Why do you love doing what you do?

Wow! Where to begin? There are so many aspects of my job at ESPN that I love that it’s hard to pinpoint any one particular thing as “the best.” I think if I have to say what’s “best,” it’s more on the order of conceptual. I love my job because I wake up every day excited about work and looking forward to whatever that day brings. As someone who gets bored easily, I need variety in my days… and with injuries, I get plenty of that, mainly because they’re unpredictable. I might start my day planning to write a blog update on several injured players and halfway through the day, someone new goes down with a season-ending injury. Minutes later, there might be a specific piece to write on that injury, along with appearances on radio and TV to explain the injury and analyze its impact. A day can start one way and end completely differently.

I also am fortunate to work with so many amazing people covering a variety of different sports at ESPN. I get the perspective of numerous athletes who share their insight as to how injuries have impacted them at their positions which helps further inform my analysis. I have learned immeasurable tricks of the trade from other journalists, anchors and producers who help me continue to grow in my new profession.

How many people can say twenty-plus years into their professional life that they’re never bored and they continue to learn? Those have always been goals of mine in achieving professional satisfaction…and I’m lucky enough to say I have found a work environment where both of those things are true.

You have carved out a unique niche as an expert on injuries as they relate to fantasy sports. How did you make that happen? Was it luck or good planning?

Ha! I’d like to think it was a little bit of both (luck and good planning) and there’s no doubt that timing is everything. But truthfully, I did take some deliberate steps to try to achieve the goal of becoming a “sports injury analyst” (a title I invented for what it was I hoped to accomplish).

I have been a sports fan for as long as I can remember. My earliest childhood memories are of watching Wide World of Sports on TV, and attending football and baseball games in the Bay Area with my family. When I decided I wanted to go into medicine, I always knew it would evolve to the area of sports medicine.

As my medical knowledge grew, I became more sensitive to how sports injuries were described in the media. There were numerous inaccuracies and to be fair, the folks covering sports did not have a medical background, so how could they be expected to interpret how a given injury might impact an athlete? Concurrently, legal analysts in the media were starting to have a presence. Experienced attorneys were offering their insights and opinions on cases in which they were not directly involved, but could do so based on their expertise. I thought, “Why couldn’t I do the same thing for sports injuries?”

Around the time I was having those thoughts, I was also starting to play fantasy football…which I immediately loved. I played in a competitive co-ed league and any edge was valuable. It didn’t take long for other players in my league to come to me asking me about injuries and I realized there might be a market for this information. So did my league commissioner. As it happened, he (an engineer by day), was starting a side business creating fantasy draft boards. He attended a Fantasy Sports Trade Association meeting (FSTA) and told me I needed to go to the next one and pitch my idea.

I did go to the next FSTA meeting and met lots of folks with other ideas of growing the fantasy football market. Many of them thought I might have an interesting perspective, but overall they were discouraging in that they said, “Great idea…but no one is going to pay you for that.” Apparently they didn’t know that a surefire way to get me to do something is to tell me that I can’t.

Over the next several months, I was able to convince a fantasy football news service, KFFL, to give me space within someone else’s column to talk injuries. That small weekly piece was ultimately noticed by Rotowire, another fantasy news and information service, who brought me on board to write a weekly column, write featured for their preseason magazines and appear on their satellite radio shows. The increased attention to the “injury analysis” was great, but for all intents and purposes, it was not money-making. I was working full-time in the clinic and teaching in a physical therapy program and a post-professional fellowship, reserving one all-nighter a week (certainly not as easy as they were in college) to produce my column. I was banking on it getting noticed at some point and leading to bigger and better things.

And so it did. Ultimately the folks at ESPN fantasy who were looking to expand the fantasy games department got wind of my material. One thing led to another, I came out to ESPN for an audition and here I am!

Everything I have done up to this point, especially the thousands of patients I have treated and the medical relationships I have built, has enabled me to be successful in this endeavor. As much as it seems like a long and winding road to get here, I think it has all been a necessary precursor to being able to function in this role.

Being a woman in this fantasy sports industry is at least somewhat unique. What kind of extra responsibility do you feel, given your unique position as somewhat of a pioneer?

There certainly aren’t too many of us (women) in the industry although I am glad to see that the number is growing. I don’t know that I feel any particular responsibility as a woman per se, other than that for any young girls who might see a woman functioning very well in the sports world – and enjoying herself – if that encourages them, then that is fantastic.

And the competitor in me wants to win all of my fantasy leagues…

Seroiusly though, my main responsibility I believe is to represent my profession, physical therapy, in a positive and credible fashion. I strive to bring the most accurate, credible information to my job every day to help the audience understand more about injuries and how they impact athletes. Many recreational athletes (many of whom watch ESPN and/or participate in fantasy sports) have suffered similar injuries and they identify with that topic. Since I have worked with athletes of all ages and levels of ability, I can bring that experience to the job. I also hope to convey to the audience that physical therapists have to have a breadth of medical knowledge and relationships with a variety of other medical professionals to be able to do their job well.

Tell us where you see your kind of job going in the future. What haven’t you done in your position that you would like to do?

As I indicated earlier, one of the benefits of my job is that it evolves daily so I continue to be able to take on new and different challenges. Already, I have been able to expand beyond the realm of fantasy sports to provide injury analysis for a variety of sports (including basketball, cycling and NASCAR to name a few). I have also been able to contribute where we have addressed larger health issues on our ESPN platforms (concussions in the NFL, STOP campaign for youth overuse injuries) and this is an area I would like to continue to develop. We have the potential to reach an audience, especially in the youth realm, who may not be interested in reading “scientific” articles that might be beneficial for them. But when we package it in a story that involves athletes with whom they identify (like Sam Bradford and John Smoltz in our STOP article), they will read it…and we can provide education and resources for them that they might otherwise not have tapped into.

Anything else to add regarding fantasy sports, sports injuries, or anything else?

If it’s not clear by now, I want to reiterate how much I love what I do and how lucky I am to do it. It’s a labor of love…but it is work. It’s like being on-call 24/7 for injuries and beyond keeping up with the sports world, it requires staying up-to-date in the sports medicine world. That said, I believe that anyone can do anything he or she sets out to do and I also believe in following your passion. I knew what it was that I wanted to do, it just took some creativity – and stubbornness – to get there.

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