Throughout the year, the Southern Conference will feature a former student-athlete from around the league in a series called Where Are They Now. This will be an opportunity to get reacquainted with student-athletes after their competition days have come to an end. The question and answer session will focus on a former student-athlete who has gone on to a career away from the field, course, mat or court.
Our fourth Where Are They Now feature focuses on former Davidson volleyball player, Brooke Bentley. While at Davidson, Bentley held the single-season record for digs in 1997 with 444. Bentley, who was a member of the Davidson squad that won the 1999 and 2000 Southern Conference Championship, was the recipient of the 2001 Dorothy Hicks Graduate Scholarship.
Brooke Bentley
Davidson Volleyball (1997-2000)—political science (minored in Spanish)
Grad School: USC, School for Communications and Journalism
Current Profession: Yahoo! Sports Radio anchor, sideline reporter
You referred to yourself as a “Texas girl.” How did you end up at Davidson?
It’s really funny. I didn’t know that much about the school and I was playing club volleyball and Lisa Marston who was the coach then contacted me and sent me a letter. I had thought about going to school in North Carolina, but I really thought I would end up going to SMU, schools closer to where I lived because I knew people going there, I talked to the coaches a lot more, and I honestly knew nothing about Davidson.
She (Marston) just kept calling me and telling me that I need to come up for a trip so I decided to go and it was sort of a last minute thing and I went and the school was so beautiful. The team was so much fun and I had the most wonderful weekend getting to know the team and Lisa sold me on the program. After that I knew I was going to go to Davidson. I was sold. It took one trip.
Was it difficult to go to a school where you knew nobody?
No, not at all because your volleyball team is like your family. You have this instant set of friends when you’re on a team like that, especially with volleyball and you start practicing in August. You are there before school starts so you have time to get to know each other. It’s cool because they can help you acclimate to the to the school and show you the ins and outs, like where to eat or what stores to go to. So I instantly felt like I had a group of friends, especially my class, we were really close and clicked right away on the team.
What was it like to balance school and volleyball?
Davidson is not an easy school at all and I wasn’t quite prepared for how much work that I would be doing. I went to a competitive high school, a private school called St. John’s, but Davidson is a whole different level when it comes to colleges. You have to be really organized. You have classes, lifting, practice, you have all these things to do from the afternoon to the evening and games on the weekend or during the week. I had to really budget my time extremely well.
My senior year in the spring I didn’t have volleyball and I saw myself procrastinating so much because I didn’t have that schedule that I was so used to being on. I think I really didn’t know what to do with myself. During the season, you have to be so diligent about doing your work and making sure you stay on top of things because you can’t pull all-nighters because you have games and practice and you’d be so tired the next day. Davidson is competitive academically but it really pushed me. It was so rewarding though because I really felt like I got the best of both worlds. I got a wonderful education and I got to play a Division I sport, not many people can say that.
What is one thing that sticks out to you from your time at Davidson?
I would say when the team won the conference tournament my junior year (1999). It was amazing, we were undefeated in the conference that season and it was just a really fun group, we all just got along so well. The juniors, seniors and sophomores were really close. We won conference and I will never forget that moment. I still have the picture blown-up poster size where we are holding our fingers up saying ‘We are number 1!’ and holding the trophy. It was such an incredible feeling. We worked so hard all season and for us to just enjoy that the way we did as friends, it was really special.
Do you still talk to any of your former teammates?
Yes, I talk to them a lot. None of them live in Houston, but I used to live in California, when I went to USC and I lived across the street from Erica Schwartz, who was my setter. I just saw Catherine Lauren, who was the defensive specialist, she is in Houston a lot for work. We email and talk and some of the girls are really good about organizing get-togethers.
You mentioned USC, could you talk a little bit about what you did after you left Davidson?
I was so lucky because I got a postgraduate scholarship through the conference. I wanted to go to graduate school, but I was kind of unsure what I wanted to do. Part of me wanted to go law school. My dad’s an attorney and I worked in a law firm for a year and I realized that’s not for me. So I ended up in Los Angeles and I was working for 20th Century Fox Television and I just read something about how wonderful the journalism school is at USC, so I went and visited and talked to some people there. I had always loved to write and as a young child, I wanted to be a sports broadcaster and I didn’t know if that would end up panning out, but I didn’t have a journalism background. So I applied to the journalism school at USC and ended up getting in, and went there for my Master’s.
Do you feel your time at Davidson prepared you for the competitive program at USC?
There’s certain things that are very technical when you go into broadcasting as far as operating equipment, or things of that nature. As far as my writing skills, at Davidson you write a lot. So I felt like I was ahead of the game when it came to writing.
You mentioned you had wanted to be a sports broadcaster, how did you end up getting involved in that?
I have really loved sports my entire life. Sports have been something that I have always done, and when I left Davidson I felt really lost without having sports in my life. It was really strange for me, I was used to having practices, it was so much a part of my school experience that I really missed it. I kept thinking about how I could stay involved in sports and really make it a part of my work life as well.
I think there is something about sports that brings people together from all walks of life and there’s a commonality there and you share in these great moments together. I just really wanted to get back to that. That was part of the reason why I wanted to go to journalism school.
I was lucky enough to work with the athletic department at USC. At the time, the football program was one of the best in the country so I was around this time that was getting covered by the LA Times, ESPN, NFL Network, big time media outlets. I was covering them for the local TV station that the University adds programming to online. So I was writing and doing television reports, so that’s how I ended up getting involved.
For most of my classes at school I was doing more political stories or local beats that we would do, so I just did sports on my own time and I really enjoyed it.
Talk a little bit about your time with the Houston Texans. What were your main responsibilities with them?
At USC, they actually offered me a job to stay on after I graduated. They wanted to generate their own media and have people get out in front and do shows and so they were interested in hiring me to do that. I had looked at some jobs in journalism associated with sports and the Texans had a position open for an in-house reporter. So the responsibilities were writing stories for the team’s web site and publications, doing online video work, doing work for the jumbotron and helping to produce half time shows. It was very multimedia and it was something that I really liked. I just felt like that was the trend where everything was going. And I thought working for an NFL team was going to be an incredible experience.
I interviewed, and it just happened that the job was in my hometown, so they hired me to be the in-house reporter; the media coordinator was my official title. I traveled with the team, I went to every game, home and away, Green Bay when it’s five below zero. I went to NFL scouting combines, I got to see things that only people who work in the NFL get to do. For me to it’s very interesting because I am a female. At the NFL scouting combine when you’re evaluating talent, there are some female reporters there, but as far as people who are with the team, I looked around and realized that I was the only female in the entire stadium. It was a surreal moment for me. It was a great experience working with the Texans. I got to experience a lot of incredible things.
What did you do after you left the Texans?
It was really hard to leave the Texans. I talked to a lot of people in the industry, especially people at the NFL Network and I told them that I wanted to broaden my horizons and expand my repertoire. I did a lot of interviewing and within two weeks, I ended up getting offered a job in a town called Beaumont, it’s about 90 miles east of Houston. It was close enough to where I covered a lot of Houston sports. I covered the Astros, the Texans, the Rockets. It was nice because I could still have my finger on what was going on in Houston and I got a chance to be a local anchor.
I had two thirty-minute shows that I anchored on Sundays and I did sideline reporting and I got to do all the things that I wanted to do. I signed a two-year contract with the company in Beaumont and worked there for two years.
What are you doing now?
I work for Yahoo! Sports Radio, but I still do contract work for TV sideline reporting. I really do love doing sideline reporting. I got engaged, so I needed to be in Houston to be with my fiancé so I was really looking for jobs that I could be based in Houston and still be involved in the NFL, because that’s where I felt like most of my ties were, and NFL jobs are hard to come by. Yahoo! Sports Radio offered me a job to cover the Texans.
I anchor through the radio several days a week and I go to practice and do in-depth interviews with players. I also do sideline reporting for the radio on game days. I give a report every 15 minutes about what is going on at the game and then get postgame interviews, and I do a pregame web show. It’s all come full circle for me because I’m working with the Texans, doing a lot of multimedia work, and with Yahoo! I do video, radio and then on the side I’m contracted to do sideline reporting for TV.
Do you think you can pick job that has been your favorite?
What I enjoy the most is sideline reporting, but that’s not my full-time job right now because I only get to do it once a week. So it’s so hard to say, there’s parts of each one of my jobs that I love so much that it’s really hard to pinpoint which one. I have to say on game days when I’m working for Yahoo! I love it. My favorite part is being a part of the game experience, being a part of the action and I think that’s the athlete in me. I love being able to see what going on, talk about and relay that information and talk about how coaches are reacting. That’s why I also love the sideline reporting. I love the game and the environment of it. I think if I had to break down my job, that would be my favorite part, and I love doing that on Sundays with Yahoo! and getting to do that at the Texans games.
What are the similarities of being a former student-athlete and being in front of the camera or doing interviews with professional athletes?
There are a lot of similarities between reporting and playing a game. Once you get in the flow of reporting, you get into a flow. You let yourself go and be a part of the moment and you don’t overthink it and it happens. Beforehand is when you take a deep breath. There’s a sense of confidence and being calm that you have to have and not overthinking it. It’s so easy to overthink what you’re going to say or over dissect your performance after. Everyone is going to have a mistake, like you have a bad play in volleyball, I’m going to have a mistake on air. You sort of have to shake it off and keep going and know you have another report and you can do a great job on that one.
How did being a student-athlete affect your life after college?
I feel like it gave me great organization skills and it made me very task orientated to get things done. As a college athlete you know how to roll with the punches, there are going to be times that you get yelled at by your coach, you’re not trying hard enough. Well you get yelled at by your boss too. There are times when your performance isn’t good enough and you’re critiqued and I think you learn how to take that as an athlete, and you know how to perform in front of people.
Do you still follow the SoCon or anything that goes on at Davidson?
Oh yeah! It was so exciting when Davidson made the Elite 8 with Stephen Curry. Davidson was all over the place nationally. It was funny because I was working for the Texans at the time and all the players realized that’s where I went to school. A lot of them had never heard of Davidson because a lot of them go to these big time schools. It was cool because it made Davidson really relevant. I go on the web site and follow the volleyball team more than anything, but also the basketball team.
What advice would you give to current student-athletes?
Enjoy it. Being a student-athlete is so much work, and when you’re in it it’s hard to look past it, but when you look back and think how you had the experience to play a sport and go to school and have your community rally around you is so awesome. Give it your all and enjoy it with everything you’ve got because you don’t want to have any regrets when you look back on it. Give it your all and soak it all in, because it’s such a wonderful experience.