“The foundation of what you’re seeing now in college sports was laid by Carol Stiff, period. Are there many others that were in there? Yes. But Carol did as much or more as anybody in the business and in the sports world.”
— George Bodenheimer, former ESPN president
“Her impact goes well beyond ESPN. We are the primary beneficiary of her impact, because she was here for so long doing work on our behalf, on the company’s behalf. But really, given what’s happened in the last several years and given the trajectory that women’s sports is on for the foreseeable future, maybe forever, there’s very few people who are more responsible for that than Carol.”
— Burke Magnus, ESPN vice president of content
“Carol calls, people listen. She doesn’t cry wolf. She’s calling because she believes there’s an audience. She believes there’s a business reason. She believes there’s growth possibility, and clearly she was right about all those things. It was something she was way ahead of the curve on.
“She was a groundbreaking thinker in her advocacy and her recognition of the potential of women’s sports long before the rest of the world caught on. She was just a visionary when it came to the deep recognition of what women’s sports, as a business, can be.”
— Josh Krulewitz, ESPN executive vice president of communications
“If you build it, they will come, and she always had that mentality. And I have to say, she had a huge impact. I mean, you wouldn’t see any of this today on TV, yeah, if it weren’t for Carol and her persistence.”
— Laura Sandillo, former ESPN associate manager for programming and acquisitions
“She just won people over. Maybe the art of Carol Stiff was the ability to, over time, get everyone aligned around the idea or the opportunity.”
— Chris LaPlaca, former ESPN communications chief
“Because of the importance of television to sports, that’s where Carol really made her mark there. She was the one at ESPN who kind of reinforced the importance of women’s sports, and not just sort of as a charity, but as a sport with viewer appeal. We know that because of the numbers we started seeing in the early ‘90s around these key college matchups. And then the WNBA came on the back of all of that. It’s taken the generation we expected when the WNBA launched; we expected it would take 30 years, 25 or 30 years, for the league to really hit its stride. And that’s what’s happening now. And to ESPN’s credit, they’ve been there for the entire journey. And Carol was it. Carol was ESPN women’s basketball for a lot of that time.”
— Val Ackerman, Big East commissioner and founding president of the WNBA
“The impact is Caitlin Clark. The impact is Angel Reese. The impact is all of these personalities now that grew up being able to watch women. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. And all of these players grew up with the ability to watch the great players from decades ago. And that’s the impact. It literally was the foundation for which women’s basketball has grown, her ability to get all of those games on. And now there isn’t a game you can’t find somewhere.”
— Mimi Griffin, former ESPN women’s basketball analyst
“She always made people feel like they were part of the team. She was a point guard, but she distributed the ball really well to others and made them feel a part of the big picture; that it wasn’t about her, it wasn’t about ESPN. It was about the sport and how can we grow the sport, and how that person could have a role in that.”
— Robin Roberts, former ESPN broadcaster
“She was the best programmer in women’s college hoops of all time. That to me is a great skill. She called these people up, worked with them, worked to get the games scheduled when we had air slots, had the credibility. There wasn’t anybody she couldn’t get on the phone to try to play each other.”
— Dave Brown, who spent more than 20 years in programming at ESPN and is founder of Gridiron
