Alumna Covers Winter Olympics for NBC Sports
Kathryn Tappen, a broadcaster for NBC Sports, will be a host during the XXIII Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea
During her impressive 15-year career as a television sports broadcaster, these days with NBC Sports, alumna Kathryn Tappen has covered Super Bowls, NHL all-star games, hallowed Notre Dame football, and all manner of Boston’s championship teams. Still, she reserves a special place in her heart for the Olympics.
“The Olympics are unlike anything we cover at NBC Sports,” says Tappen RC’03, SCILS’03, a four-year Academic All-American as a member of the Scarlet Knights women’s track-and-field teams (she held the school record for the 3,000-meter steeplechase event). “It’s on the world stage, a global event. I am with the network in a different country, doing what we do. I am covering Team USA! I am incredibly passionate and patriotic about our country.”
Leveraging her enthusiasm and expertise, NBC Sports has sent Tappen to PyeongChang, South Korea, to be part of the network’s coverage of the XXIII Winter Olympics. It will be her third stint at the Olympics, having covered the 2014 Winter Games held in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Tappen will serve as a host of NBC Sports' presentation of the men’s and women’s hockey tournaments, repeating her role from four years ago. What will be different in the men’s competition, however, is that none of the star players of the National Hockey League who come from all over the world will be on the rosters to represent their national team. For Tappen, these guys are usually her bread and butter: in sports circles, she is best known as a host of the pre- and postgame show NHL Live, which is broadcast two or three times a week throughout the hockey season. It’s an hour-long show featuring the latest on star players and upcoming games, with Tappen orchestrating the analysis and direction of the program.
“My role as the studio host is to be the traffic cop, but I am also responsible many times for getting us to the commercial break,” says Tappen, a journalism major who minored in political science. “I also have to lead our analysts in the right direction and make sure that we stay on track to get to the things we have to get to. I try to bring out their personalities and maybe poke them a little bit so that they will go after each other a little bit.”
Tappen went after a career in broadcast journalism with gusto. Just three years out of Rutgers, she landed at the New England Sports Network where for five years she covered Boston’s professional teams, back when the Celtics, Red Sox, Patriots, and Bruins were winning one championship after another as Tappen was falling in love with the city and its fans. She quickly became so used to interviewing delirious athletes in winning dressing rooms that she knew enough to wear a baseball cap, raincoat, and rubber boots in order to survive the deluge of Champagne.
Then it was on to the NHL Network in 2011, where she hosted a seven-hour broadcast, a trial-by-fire experience during which she and her lean staff found creative ways to fill the airtime as she accrued an encyclopedic knowledge of the league and its players. “I came to understand the league and the power of hosting,” says Tappen, who grew up on a rich diet of sports in Morristown, New Jersey. “It was a miracle what we accomplished.”
Four years ago, Tappen joined NBC Sports, where her portfolio of work continues to grow. Aside from her regular gig on NHL Live, and big events such as Super Bowls, all-star games, and the Olympics, she is the sideline reporter for the network’s Notre Dame Football, the Saturday broadcast that calls on all her resources of preparation and resilience that she developed as a top student and athlete at Rutgers.
Her ascent is all the more remarkable given the fact that Tappen, too busy with academics and athletics, didn’t accrue a minute of broadcast experience while in college. Nonetheless, just out of Rutgers, which she adored, she was invited to take part in a two-day audition as an on-air talent for the nascent College Sports Television Network. By the end of the weekend, Tappen had been chosen over 99 other aspiring young women, and a broadcasting career was born.
Along the way, she has had a built-in advantage as a broadcaster. “I understand, because of my own experience with track, what an athlete goes through,” Tappen says. “I know what the work ethic is like in balancing a lot of things in your life and trying to be very good at all of them. And, in this job, there is a lot to balance.”
Read more about Kathryn Tappen in Rutgers Magazine.