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"A couple of years ago, I felt like that turned," she says. "In fairness, also, I got better at my job."
"When I started, I could not even comprehend the amount of people who said to me: 'Who's your father? How did you get his job?'" Smith recalls.
In recent years she's taken a more active role in changing that. She also now has a platform to hire staff and to mold conversations as a coordinating producer for "We Need to Talk," the all-women sports show on cable channel CBS Sports Network.
She then found herself in the right place in the big sports town that is Philadelphia. While still in college,Cheap NFL Jerseys, Smith interned at a local station that televised Phillies games.
"All of a sudden," she says, "one day time slowed down."
Of working with Smith, Gumbel says, "It's a very secure feeling when you're talking about something and that pops up on screen."
In that Steelers-Rams matchup, St. Louis linebacker James Laurinaitis was about to pass Merlin Olsen as the franchise's career tackles leader. Smith had a shot of Olsen's name on the stadium's Ring of Fame ready to go for when Laurinaitis set the record.
Smith teams with producer Bob Mansbach, who guides the course of the telecast. The director puts that plan into action.
Directing sports telecasts is a lot about preparation, for both the predictable and the unpredictable. Smith is the only woman currently directing NFL games. A lifetime of experiences helped prepare her for this role.
Smith joined CBS in 1983 and says she feels her bosses have fairly judged her by her work. But there were a lot of people to prove herself to week after week, and the crews she works with on NFL games tend to be almost entirely male.
Sparks from the pyrotechnics that accompany player introductions started the small blaze, which wound up delaying the game's start by nearly 30 minutes. Smith realized one of CBS's cameras probably caught that moment, and sure enough, they found it and were able to show it to viewers at home.
As Greg Gumbel, the play-by-play announcer who works with Smith, puts it: "Who expects the field to get set on fire?"
Smith was also growing up at the right time, when girls were getting more opportunities to compete on an equal playing field because of Title IX, the educational gender-equity law. She earned an athletic scholarship to Temple, where she studied broadcasting.
"I loved doing live television," she says.
"Over time, you get the respect of these guys. But you have to earn it," she says. "Then when you get it from one guy, he passed it on to the other guy. Now all of a sudden people are like, 'Oh,Wholesale Jerseys, great, you're doing our game.' Whereas I don't know what they were saying before, but they were probably saying, 'Who's this woman doing our game?'"
"Am I surprised there aren't more women doing it? I'm not surprised,Cheap Jerseys Free Shipping, but I'm perhaps disappointed," she says.
Of preparing more women to ascend to leadership roles, Smith says, "I am taking responsibility for it."
She's heard from her colleague who books the crews that people want to work for her now.
Typically those images might be used as a backdrop when the commentators welcome viewers or the broadcast comes back from commercial. But for last month's matchup between the Steelers and Rams in St. Louis, they proved particularly illuminating.
"My father WATCHES television," she remembers thinking.
NEW YORK (AP) — Suzanne Smith likes to assign a cameraperson to shoot the teams running onto the field when she directs NFL games for CBS.
Smith is less concerned by the fact she's the only female director of NFL broadcasts — she notes there are, at most, just 16 games a week — than by the dearth of women working as directors, producers and executives across sports television.
When she was breaking into the business in the early 1980s, she didn't really think of herself as a trailblazer, though there were plenty of reminders this was a male-dominated field.
"I was right on the cusp of that,Authentic NFL Jerseys Cheap, that girls can do these things," she says.
"Coming up through the ranks,Nike Shox Gravity Black, yes, don't be naive about it: There has been a tremendous amount of obstacles," Smith says. "But I like to say that the passion outweighed the struggles."
Smith sits in on the announcers' meetings with players and coaches on the Friday and Saturday before a game, then they all discuss how they'll handle certain situations.
"My parents treated me like I could do anything," she says.
Just like a football player going from college to the pros, in the transition from associate director to director, the game seems so fast at first.
He did, however, help instill in her a belief that she belonged. When Smith was 11,Wholesale Nike NFL Jerseys, her dad and uncle insisted she should enter a soap box derby that was supposedly boys-only.
After graduating, she was directing a morning news show and realized she enjoyed working on college basketball games at night much better. |
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