Amanda Gifford grew up with sports nuts.

However, that wasn’t always how she wanted to make her living. When she came to Penn State, Gifford originally pursued a degree in elementary education. This was because she didn’t want to work during nights, weekends, and holidays.

However, after getting involved with radio at Penn State, she realized she wanted to be in media in the future, and this set the foundation for her to become the vice president of College Football production at ESPN.

Gifford began her college career at the State University of New York College at Geneseo. Since this was a small college, Gifford realized she wanted to attend a bigger school with more opportunities after her first year. The following year, she transferred to Penn State but had to spend her first semester at Penn State Altoona because the university didn’t let students transfer to University Park.

After one semester in Altoona, Gifford finally transferred to University Park and wanted to join a club that fit her interests. Even though her options were limited, one club caught her attention: CommRadio.

CommRadio was starting up and had just eight members when Gifford joined. With her new role, she had the opportunity to do many things from running a talk show, helping with the broadcast of football games, and providing commentary for basketball.

As she was doing all these things, the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism was starting up at the university. With more opportunities opening up for her, she decided to join the Curley Center and pursue her journalism degree even though she was already 2.5 years into her elementary education major, so it made sense for her to finish both degrees. However, she persevered and found a way to balance her two majors.

“When I think back at Penn State, it’s just the amount of people that helped me figure out how I can make two majors work,” Gifford told Onward State. “All the things I was able to do, all the experiences I was able to have, whether it was working with CommRadio, doing games, or learning from a legend like John Curley in a class was just amazing. I’m most proud of my ability to manage both of those things all at once.”

During her senior year, Gifford had the opportunity to do a summer internship at ESPN. Due to her radio experience, ESPN put her in its radio department as a production assistant. In this role, she was tasked with tape cutting, board running, and other things that entry-level employees do at radio stations. This experience made her realize she loved working in sports.

After the internship, Gifford went back to Penn State for her final semester and student-taught in third grade at a school in Houserville. She graduated in December 2004 and a month later, ESPN hired her full-time as a production assistant.

In this role, Gifford produced Colin Cowherd’s show, “The Herd.” She was tasked with guest booking, interview prep, topic development, and logistical and operational duties for the show. After five years in this role, Gifford was moved to program director for ESPN Radio where she had the responsibility of overseeing the program lineups for nights, weekends, and overnights.

For 12 years, she worked in ESPN Radio, but even though she learned a lot, she knew it wasn’t the final destination in her career.

During her time at ESPN Radio, Gifford interacted with people around ESPN from different roles and groups. However, one group had a lot of interactions with her during this time: the talent group. This group was in charge of hiring talent, succession planning, who’s doing what on the air, and contract negotiations. So, after 12 years on ESPN Radio, Gifford moved to the talent office where she was given the role of senior director of talent negotiations and recruitment.

Using her experience from her previous role, Gifford was responsible for all talent matters related to ESPN shows. Through this role, she had to do contract negotiations, meet external agents, and work with people across the company. During these three years, she grew her network internally and externally. In 2019, she switched roles and became a coordinating producer before getting the offer to become the vice president of content strategy and audio. After two years in that role, Gifford left the talent office and took advantage of the leadership opportunity.

This role involved a lot of responsibilities for Gifford. Not only was she part of the executive leadership team with content strategy and planning for studio shows like SportsCenter, but she also had to oversight ESPN Radio, the talent production group, and co-oversight the Universal Coverage Group. This involved making sure that people booked guests for ESPN shows and figuring out feeds for planning content, coverage, and technical aspects related to any sports stories and games.

Her bosses at ESPN took notice of all the hard work Gifford was putting into this leadership role. Then last year, she got a call asking her if she was interested in being in charge of all college football event production. Despite having some concerns about the job, she knew she couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

“[It] was quite the call, because I had never worked in event production before,” Gifford said. “There were a lot of people I didn’t know. But knowing it was college football, which is my favorite sport, I jumped at the opportunity.”

As vice president of college football production, Gifford has a lot of priorities. She said while her day-to-day responsibilities might be different, she has a similar cadence by the week, which involves a lot of scheduling. This means that she has to think about what announcers will be assigned to what games, where production crews are going, and make sure to accommodate vacation requests that the production staff requests. Not only does her role involve a lot of scheduling, but it also involves a lot of watching college football games.

Gifford does this to give feedback to crews at ESPN like production and broadcasting. She watches these games and makes clips to show them what they are doing well and what they need to improve on.

With college football being one of those sports where the schedule isn’t definitive until six days until the weekend, Gifford talked about how much work her team puts in to manage the logistics of broadcasting games across different regions with different conditions, facilities, and schedules.

She said they have a lot to figure out each week since ESPN broadcasts more than 25 games each week. Not only does Gifford have to figure out crew assignments, but she also has to have meetings and collaborations with so many different groups across ESPN over the course of the week in order to have a general plan of action heading into every Saturday. On gameday, Gifford’s role varies as she can be with the broadcast team at games or at ESPN headquarters.

“It definitely takes a team of people to ensure all goes smoothly,” Gifford said. “Our leadership team makes the decisions and then everybody operates in their ‘lane’ to get us to gameday, and then only to rinse and repeat six days later for 17 straight weeks. It’s a grind, but a fun one.”

Gifford understands the amount of hard work that everyone needs to put into these productions. For that reason, she values the importance of making sure that everyone is OK and that there is a sense of community in her work environment. She said that it’s important to create a culture and work environment that everyone wants to be a part of in the sport of college football and have fun.

Along with having this as one of her top priorities, Gifford said that her top goal in her role is to put on great ESPN broadcasts for their audience. She wants to make sure that it’s established that ESPN is the home of college football.

“Some of our production priorities for the season apply to all of our games [is to] inform and educate,” Gifford said. “Teach me about the game, put it in context, [and] tell me what this game means. The main priority is to document the game.”

Over her 20-year career at ESPN, Gifford has achieved many accomplishments and milestones. Not only has she won two Emmy awards for her contributions to SportsCenter, but she’s also proud of all the different areas of the company she has worked in. She’s thankful for working at ESPN for 20 years with so many great people and having the opportunity to mentor people behind her so they could have the same working experience she’s had.

As Gifford looked back on her journey, she gave useful advice to people who are looking to work in the sports industry in the near future.

“Be ready to work nights, weekends, holidays [and] be ready to have fun,” Gifford said. “Sports are real-life reality TV. There’s nothing that brings people together like live sporting events or sports in general. Every job has its challenges some days, but overall, it doesn’t get much better than arguing around the water cooler over the Yankees and Red Sox.”