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Women In Sports Media-Jane Chastain

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Women in Sports Media

Women in Sports Media

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Jane Chastain made history as one of the nation's first female sportscasters. She spent 17 years covering sports on television. In 1966 she was the first female sports reporter allowed on the field for a National League Baseball team (covering the Atlanta Braves),  She was also the first woman allowed in the NASCAR pits. In 1974, she became the first woman in an NBA basketball locker room where she interviewed the Portland Trailblazers.

In 1963 Jane began her career making football predictions as Coach Friday for Atlanta's WAGA-TV. In 1967 she moved to Raleigh-Durham, NC where she covered sports for WRAL. In 1969 Chastain moved to Miami and worked for the CBS affiliate WTVJ-TV. In Miama she sent from three feature sports stories a week to anchoring the top sports news show in the market, with a record of 10 news stories in one day. In Miama she also worked with an independent producer on "The Jane Chastain Show-Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sports but Were Afraid to Ask, a series of 195 90 second vignettes which were inserted in local news programs in 88 of the nation's top television stations.

In 1974 CBS hired Chastain as the first woman to broadcast sports on a regular basis for a network. She covered teh NFL, NBA, the Cotton Bowl, the Sun Bowl, the Pan Am Games goft and tennis. Ater a one year contract with CBS, she returned to Miami for a year, then moved to Los Angeles where she anchored sports for KABC-Tv until leaving sports in 1978.  Lesley Visser, another long-term female sportscaster says of Chastain, "She's our Jackie Robinson.)

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