🏆 Leading Sideline Coverage for the White Sox and Big Ten Network

Brooke Fletcher is an On-Field Reporter for the Chicago White Sox and a Sideline Reporter for the Big Ten Network, with additional work on Apple TV's Friday Night Baseball. Her path started in pageants and theater, wound through a student-run TV station at Auburn, a spontaneous move to New York City, and a stint hosting digital content in Detroit before she found her footing as a national sideline host with The Rally. Today, her work centers on one idea: getting close enough to players to find the story only she noticed.

A Stage Before a Sideline

Brooke grew up in Peachtree City and Fayetteville, Georgia, the daughter of a father who played 15 years of Major League Baseball. Theater, competitive cheerleading, and pageants filled her early years, and a judge at Miss Teen USA, where Brooke was competing as Miss Georgia Teen USA, was the one who first planted the idea that she could host for a living. “I actually wanted to go into entertainment,” she says, recalling an MTV audition in New York while she was still in high school. Sports wasn’t the plan yet. It was a stage she hadn’t stepped onto.

Finding Sports at Auburn

At Auburn, Brooke worked with the student-run Eagle Eye TV, learning the basics of producing and directing. Her freshman year, Auburn won the national championship with Cam Newton at quarterback; her senior year, the team returned to the title game. “I really was like, oh, I kind of want to do sports,” she says. That shift, more than any single class or internship, set her career in motion.

Choosing Charlotte Over the Middle of Nowhere

After graduation, a former Eagle Eye TV colleague tipped her off to an associate director opening at ESPNU and SEC Network. The alternative was a small-market job in Washington state for $30,000 a year. She chose Charlotte instead, betting she could work her way from behind the camera to in front of it. For three and a half years, she did exactly that, finishing her AD shifts and then staying late to build out early digital segments, including a recurring bit on College Football Daily, while also competing as Miss Georgia USA and driving back and forth to Atlanta most weeks.

Betting on New York, Then Detroit

Eventually, Brooke quit her job and moved to New York on a friend’s suggestion, with no job lined up. She and a roommate shared a 500 square foot studio, and she took acting classes and commercial auditions while working as a hostess at a pizza place in Jersey City to cover rent. She kept sending her reel out until Fox Sports Detroit hired her as a digital host, with the promise that hard work could lead to sideline reporting for the Pistons, Red Wings, and Tigers. It did. She won a few Emmys along the way and eventually earned that sideline role, before COVID reshaped the industry around her.

The Rally, and What It Taught Her

Brooke calls her years at The Rally in Chicago some of the best of her career. Hosting a national show alongside Joshua Perry, Russell Dorsey, and Shams Charania meant she had to be knowledgeable, and opinionated, about every sport, every day. “I feel like I grew the most during my time at The Rally,” she says. The show ended after three years as the regional sports network model collapsed, but the friendships, and the daily group chat, never did.

The Reporter as Middleman

Now with the White Sox and Big Ten Network, Brooke sees her job as translation: “You’re basically the middleman between the players and the fan base... your job is to humanize these players.” She doesn’t need to be on camera to consider a day successful. Being knowledgeable and observant matters more, like noticing a lime green quote stitched into Munetaka Murakami’s belt and asking about it, which turned into a great story and a perfect example of how simply paying attention can uncover something worth sharing. That instinct also carried her into an unplanned moment: two hours before a broadcast, the team’s analyst called in sick, and Brooke became the first woman to serve as TV analyst in the White Sox booth.

Know Your Worth

If she could tell a younger Brooke anything, it would be this: “Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself... it's okay to stand up for yourself because I think at the end of the day people will respect that because it shows that you respect yourself.” She’s applying that same instinct to what’s next, including a podcast called Sidelined with fellow reporter Dani Klupenger, creating a safe space to talk about sports without leaving behind everything else you love.

Her why hasn’t changed since she was a kid at the ballpark with her dad. “I genuinely love sharing people's stories,” she says. “It's cheesy, but it does feel like home.”