Brooke Steach was destined to work in the sports industry.

It all started when Steach grew up around a family that loved sports in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Due to that, she knew from a young age that she wanted to pursue a career in sports media and even went on to play soccer for most of her life.

At the age of 12, Steach realized that she wanted to pursue sports broadcasting or journalism. From there, she developed her skills through many experiences, and this set the foundation for her to work at ESPN and eventually become a Digital Video Content Associate there.

Before Steach started her college career, she was able to get hands-on experience in media. Due to her father’s home remodeling business in Harrisburg, she and her brother got the opportunity to help him promote his company through local commercials that eventually got on the local news. In this experience, she learned about the process of script writing and being on camera. This was the beginning of many learning experiences for her.

In her high school, Central Dauphin High School, Steach not only played soccer for the varsity team but was also an anchor for the school’s TV station and senior editor for the school’s newspaper and senior yearbook. She was involved in many activities, and despite all her commitments, she persevered in balancing it all, while also managing to get the most out of her learning experience.

“We had a TV studio class you could take [that] you had to take prerequisites to get into it, and we got to do [script writing and being on camera] and shooting video,” Steach told Onward State. “I would go to the girls’ basketball game in high school and make hype videos for our flag football [and] Powderpuff. I always knew since then that was my main study.”

Unlike many Penn State alumni, Steach didn’t start her college career at Penn State. Due to her ambition of playing soccer in college and staying in the state of Pennsylvania, she committed to Point Park University in Pittsburgh. She was able to get a scholarship to play soccer there and be in its broadcast journalism program. Along with being a college athlete, she was a sports reporter, radio host, and TV anchor.

However, Steach began to realize the difficulty of balancing the responsibilities of being a college athlete and her other commitments. This forced her to make the hard choice between soccer and her broadcast journalism career. In the end, she chose to give up soccer and focus on her career. For that reason, she decided to transfer, and in January 2020, she came to Penn State.

Not having the responsibilities of soccer anymore, Steach wanted to make her presence known at University Park right away. However, two months after she transferred, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she struggled to get involved in her new environment. Despite that, it didn’t deter her from finding clubs that fit her interests, and, in the summer of 2020, she joined The Daily Collegian as part of their summer staff. She took on the challenge of being a reporter for Penn State women’s hockey, which she said was the thing that she was the proudest of, as this gave her the confidence she needed to settle in at Penn State.

During her time at Penn State, Steach did almost every single club that was offered within the Penn State College of Communications. In her senior year, she took advantage of the opportunity to become a video production intern with Penn State Football. In this role, she assisted with cameras for scoreboards on the field during home games, helped in the control room for the scoreboard graphics and video, set up postgame interviews with players and coaches, and operated cameras displayed on the scoreboard during home games.

Not only was Steach a video board production intern, but she was also the host for Penn State Athletics’ Unrivaled Pregame Show. Using her past experiences, she had to write, edit, and broadcast live stories that aired on Penn State Football’s Facebook before games. She also had to produce postgame shows for basketball games, cut highlights and manage graphics on the show, and create packages to be featured on the show for Penn State Football. That opportunity was the beginning of bigger things for her.

“What led to ESPN was the work I did with Penn State Football and production,” Steach said. “I made a connection with myself to do utility work in my senior year with ESPN at the 2022 Outback Bowl. When I was there, I met a production coordinator who told me about the ESPN Next program and that I should apply and talk about all my experiences I had at Penn State.”

Almost three months after the Outback Bowl, Steach was offered another opportunity at ESPN to be a runner for the NCAA Women’s Frozen Four, which was held at Pegula Ice Arena in 2022. Due to her being the Daily Collegian’s women’s hockey reporter, she said that this opportunity felt like it was meant to be.

As graduation came up for Steach, she had a lot of experience under her belt at Penn State as she prepared for the next chapter of her life. Not only did she have her experiences from the Daily Collegian, Penn State Football, and the ones before Penn State, she was a field reporter for Penn State Network Television, talk show host/news anchor for CommRadio, host for 46Live, reporter for Penn State Sports Night, anchor/social media producer at Centre County Report, and part of the Association for Women in Sports Media.

Steach graduated in the spring of 2022, and due to all her experience, she was hired by ESPN to be part of their ESPN Next program two months later. In this program, she was a production assistant where she got to work on shows like SportsCenter, NFL Countdown, NFL Live, and the 2023 NFL Draft. She created numerous videos for live shows, new content each day/week, and worked with the team to come up with show ideas.

A year after being in the ESPN Next Program, Steach was promoted to a Digital Video Content Associate. In this role, she has a lot of tasks like writing headlines and captions for ESPN.com/ESPN App video segments, creating specialty content videos/writing scripts with talent for ESPN, its social media accounts, and highlights, directing content traffic on ESPN’s platforms, and many more responsibilities. Due to her different shifts, she said that her day-to-day responsibilities are always different.

“When you’re on the day shift, you’re focused on evergreen content, and when you’re on nights, you’re focused on quick turnaround action,” Steach said. “I now do some social media work as well, where I’m coming up with storylines and ideas for ESPN platforms on Instagram and TikTok. My shifts also vary by the day.”

Due to creating breaking news video alerts and working with the copy desk, Steach talked about the importance of teamwork and accuracy when meeting strict deadlines during her time at ESPN. Using her experience from being a reporter at Penn State, she said that she’s got used to working on breaking news moments in sports and enjoys the thrill of it, as she has a great ESPN team that can help her out.

Steach has had to brainstorm and develop creative video concepts for ESPN, like an Alabama-Michigan hype video for the 2024 Rose Bowl. However, one of the social media projects that she was the proudest of was when she came up with the idea of a video of Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher, Paul Skenes. She said that it performed well on Instagram as it achieved four times the average engagement.

“It’s a video recapping [Skenes] from high school all the way to now. I pitched it in February, and it came out early May, so it was a couple of months of planning and getting the green light,” Steach said. “The same producer I worked with on the [Rose Bowl] ended up liking it, and we had it scheduled for a year since Paul Skenes’ MLB debut and did pretty well.”

As for her leadership, Steach says that the skills of being hard-working, cooperative, and a good team player guide her approach to team building and decision making. She learned that those skills could go a long way in being able to work with different groups of people down the road during her time at Penn State and ESPN.

Despite having only been at ESPN for almost three years, Steach is proud of some of her accomplishments at ESPN, including the Paul Skenes video. Another accomplishment that she was very proud of was when she was chosen to cut the highlights of Super Bowl LIX during her newsroom shift. However, despite her accomplishments, she says that she’s prouder of the collaboration success between the digital video and social media teams at ESPN because they have been able to do multiple tasks at a time and succeed in accomplishing their goals.

Due to the evolving landscape of sports media, Steach talked about how digital video will continue to evolve in the sports media landscape. She remembered that when she was in high school, there was no TikTok, but now, it’s one of her main priorities in her day-to-day when she is on social media shifts. For that reason, she’s grateful that she has her experiences from Penn State to adapt to any changes that could come.

“I’m so glad that I have my background in TV and working behind the scenes on shows like NFL Countdown and SportsCenter. All the knowledge I take from knowing breaking news and what’s good to put on social media,” Steach said. “I think that’s so important and that goes back to my time at Penn State [when I was] doing production, writing, radio, trying so many different things, taking that type of mentality and attitude into my job in the real world and then now, still trying to learn and adapt every day from different backgrounds.”

As Steach looked back on her journey from her first experience in media to ESPN, she gave useful advice to students who have the goal of working in the sports industry soon. Not only did she stress the importance of staying involved, but she also said how important it is to never give up, no matter what challenges come along the way, just like she did when the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

“Never give up on a dream, stay motivated, get involved, and use your network,” Steach said. “There’s opportunities [that] are endless. You just have to look for them, make them, prove yourself, and try to stand out in the room.”