Finding where your skills, passions, and the industry intersect with Sarah Spain

📣 Sarah Spain is good — and she knows it: A collegiate heptathlete, Spain carried that “do it all” energy into her career. She heads up content at iHeart Women’s Sports, records daily women’s sports updates for over 500 iHeart radio stations nationwide and a daily women’s sports podcast, and has a casual side hustle at espnW. Whew.

• Spain didn’t always dream of working in sports — in fact, “literally nobody mentioned it to me as a career path. It didn’t occur to me.” Her early experiences chasing a comedy career revealed her true strengths and weaknesses, prompting her to create a job in sports tailor-made for her from the ground up.

💡 The takeaways: Spain describes the Japanese term ikigai as the center of the Venn diagram showing what you’re good at and passionate about, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. For example, Spain’s skills were more in humor and quick thinking than in true acting, and the sports world sorely needed a woman analyst who could bring wittiness to her work. Voila.

• How can you combine your passions with what you’re really good at? Her top piece of advice requires some serious self-reflection, but also realistic knowledge of what the world needs. She knew fans wanted to see more of athletes’ personalities, so she used humor to draw athletes out.

• So how can you find that white space? Look for the thing that you wish existed. “There [was] no women in sports that gets to be funny and sarcastic. They either have to be a supermodel sideline reporter or so serious…I want to be Kenny Mayne and do something funny.”

• If you’re specifically dreaming of a sports journalism career, Spain knows exactly what will make you the best: be detail-oriented, overprepared, a good listener, fair to your subjects, and curious. Read everything, all the time. Oh, and don’t use AI: “It’s always wrong on women’s sports.” Noted.

🎤 Mic drop moment: “The beginning of my career was proving I could make it, both to myself and others, proving I could hang in a male-dominated space on Around the Horn, having a nightly woman-hosted national radio show, all that stuff. And now I've stepped into [finding] what is the most satisfying and what feels like I'm gonna leave something behind.… How do I change the women's sports space, get it into the next place that it needs to be, and open the door for all the women coming after me?”