Carol Stiff’s work at ESPN is most evident in women’s basketball, particularly in college and the NCAA Tournament. But for most of her three decades with the network, she was responsible for programming other collegiate sports.
Among the others ESPN had the rights to, Stiff keyed in on volleyball, gymnastics and softball for their growth potential.
“There was a beauty of women’s sports,” Stiff said. “You weren’t having to box out anybody from five other opinions in the room. If you could dream it and sell it, they didn’t bother me.”
A Super Regional for softball became one of those dreams.
Nearly 25 years ago, the NCAA baseball tournament had that round, while the softball one did not.
On Memorial Day in 2001, ESPN was airing a Yankees-Red Sox game that went long because of a rain delay. The network was contractually obligated to stay with the game, so Stiff called NCAA officials in Oklahoma City and told them to play the Arizona-UCLA championship game and she would air it on tape delay.
It rated so well that Stiff pitched John Wildhack, then ESPN’s senior vice president for programming and now the athletic director at Syracuse, on trying to create a super regional.
“She and I, we were pretty enthralled with softball as a television sport. It’s really fast paced. It fit into a two-hour window really nicely,” Wildhack said. “We’re like, ‘Let’s figure out how we get some of these games done.’ We’ll figure out what platform and when we do it, or ESPN2. And then you saw the viewership really begin to grow.”
It took time to get through, with Stiff proposing the idea to the NCAA and its committees. Even with considerations for additional funding, hosting and time away from campus, it approved the move and introduced a Super Regional round in 2005.
Stiff left ESPN in 2021, but the network has continued to benefit from her work. Last year’s Super Regional round averaged 519,000 viewers on ESPN, and included a Tennessee-Alabama game that topped 1.1 million viewers, the most ever on an ESPN platform for a game in that round.
“Every student athlete and coach who’s been involved in, certainly from women’s basketball but to Olympic sports, they may not know it, but they owe Carol Stiff if they are on some form of distribution — linear, streaming or over the top,” said Chris Plonsky, executive senior associate athletic director at Texas. “She was the mother of a lot of it, and did it behind the scenes in her own way. She championed this cause in an era where it wasn’t always popular. It wasn’t the thing to push. It wasn’t always resonating. And she kept at it and kept at it and kept at it for 30 years.”
