When Laura Rutledge was nine years old, her parents made the bold decision to relocate their family from a comfortable four-bedroom home in Atlanta to a modest two-bedroom, one-bath cottage in the tiny haven of Blue Mountain Beach in Walton County, Florida. Today, the ESPN host and sports reporter recalls the move as a pivotal moment in her childhood.

“We were getting sick a lot and worn down, and it felt like it was time to make a change,” Laura said about her parents’ decision. “I admire them. Now that I’m a parent, I don’t think I would have had the bravery to do something like that.”

Laura slept in the top bunk while her brothers, Dave, who was 14 months younger, and Alex, four years younger, shared the bottom one. Their mom homeschooled. The kids would race down the dirt path to the sand, swim around trying to find fish, and ride boogie boards until the sun went down. The beach was their backyard, their playground, and their science lab. “It really was the best time of my life,” Laura said.

After a couple of years, the kids began attending a charter school in nearby Seaside, which offered them opportunities to get involved in many activities. Laura dove into anything she could. She played percussion in the band, played the violin, started ballet, and was active in student government. One thing she wasn’t into? Sports.

“Nobody who knew me back then—including myself—thought I would end up doing this,” Laura said.

Today, the 36-year-old hosts NFL Live, a year-round, Emmy-nominated sports studio show that airs five days a week on ESPN. She also hosts a weekly college football show on the SEC Network and covers Monday Night NFL games, which are watched by over 15 million people each week. “I can’t even wrap my mind around that,” Laura said. “I haven’t taken a lot of time to really be in the moment, so I haven’t fully processed a lot of it. This was never in the realm of possibility for me in my own imagination, and I was always a big dreamer. I just had really different dreams.”

Sink or Swim

After living in Blue Mountain Beach, the family moved to Orlando, where Laura continued her artistic pursuits, especially with ballet. After high school, she was on her way to work as a professional ballet dancer when she made the eleventh-hour decision to take a different path and go to college at the University of Florida. “I was thankful my parents had sort of forced me to apply to some colleges,” she said.

That’s when she decided to check out the college radio station. She thought she would be a news reporter, but the only opening the station had at the time was in sports. She took it.

“What stuck out to me early on was that I was bad at it, and I couldn’t stand that,” Laura said. “I had to get better.” Having grown up without any background or even any interest in sports, she knew she was behind and had a lot of catching up to do. She not only had to learn the basic rules of the sport but also its entire history.

She threw herself in, getting as many on-air experiences as possible. She worked the morning show with a call time of 3:45 a.m. She covered college recruiting and, in between classes, traveled the state reporting and doing interviews, gaining credibility, making contacts, and building her knowledge base. “I realized this was something I could get good at if I just kept working on it. That was enticing to me.”

One of those early contacts landed her an entry-level position with Fox Sports, where she did pre- and post-game work for the Tampa Bay Rays broadcasts. One day, they offered her an on-air spot on TV. “I didn’t want to do TV,” she recalled. “I loved that I could show up at the radio station in my sweatpants and nobody would ever see what I looked like, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

She remembers the experience vividly. She was incredibly nervous. The pink satin shirt she chose for the occasion had visible sweat marks. She wasn’t familiar with the broadcasting equipment or the terminology. “It was definitely a treading-water-type situation. I barely got through it.”

She thought she did well, maybe good enough to keep getting opportunities. And opportunities were what she needed.

“There is no substitute for the red light coming on and you’re live,” she said.

“You can do taped pieces, and you can practice in front of a mirror and all that, but you really need to see how you will fare in those sink-or-swim moments.”

While she was dipping her toes into television reporting, she was following another unexpected path. As a joke, her friends entered her into a Miss UF competition at school, and she came in as the first runner-up, earning her some scholarship money. She liked the opportunity to practice her interviewing skills (the interview process is rigorous) and continued performing as a ballet dancer. The college money was a nice bonus. So, she kept at it, eventually being named Miss Florida 2012 and performing her last public ballet dance on the stage in the Miss America competition the next year. “I once again put myself outside my comfort zone,” she said, laughing about her unexpected turn to pageantry. “It ended up being a way to continue to hone the broadcasting skills I was working on.”

At 24 years old, after her pageant run, Laura began pushing for more. She traveled to auditions across the country, paying her own way to meetings at ESPN, where executives told her they wouldn’t hire her until she was at least 30. “They said I was too young,” she recalled. She took a job covering the San Diego Padres, which gave her experience as a fill-in host. “I thought, ‘Nobody else is going to give me that chance,’” she said. She went to California and ended up hosting her own original show. Things moved quickly from there.

In 2014, Laura was hired by ESPN, the company that had told her she was too young just the year before. In 2017, she was named host of her own national traveling show, SEC Nation. She was 28 years old.

The Mental Game

Today, Laura lives in Connecticut near the ESPN studios with her husband, former major league baseball player Josh Rutledge, and their two children, Reese and Jack.

Her work life, especially during football season, is fairly grueling. She is always prepping for her year-round five-days-a-week show, NFL Live, advancing whatever stories they are covering at the time. Prep for her Saturday SEC show is more in-depth, so she turns her attention to that on Wednesdays in pockets of time she has when the kids have gone to bed or when she has a break at the studio. For a Monday night football game, she needs to know the entire roster and what outcomes different scenarios might produce. She interviews players throughout the week, squeezing those sessions into any available time slot—usually before she goes to work on NFL Live. Then she travels to the location for the Saturday show and another one for Monday. “It all kind of melts together, and it feels like seven days of work,” she said. “Honestly, it’s a constant mental obstacle course, trying to figure out how to juggle it all.”

That juggling act extends to family life as well. “The main key for me is when I’m home with the kids, trying to be as present as possible,” Laura said. She puts her phone away when she can and just sits with them and spends quality time with them, even if it means sacrificing sleep or being a little frantic at work later. “I feel like I rarely nail it, but it’s something I’m still working through every single day,” she said. “My biggest hope is that we’ll look back on this time and say, ‘Okay, we all learned a lot from it, and we became closer as a result.’”

None of it would be possible without her husband and extended family, who all pitch in. “We just cobble it together,” she said. Her mom and dad visit from Atlanta to help, and her brother Dave now lives just down the street with his kids.

Tragically, Laura’s brother, Alex, died in 2018, in a cave-diving accident, something the whole family continues to grapple with. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to any of us,” she said. The grief is ever-present. “It changes, it evolves, but it’ll still hit you when you least expect it.”

For the Love of Sports

The balancing act is worth it, though. Laura loves the work.

She loves telling stories. She and the team document games but also try to find ways to make viewers care and feel connected to what’s happening.

For example, during the 2023 NFL playoffs, she and her team captured a story involving CJ Stroud, the rookie quarterback for the Texans. His mother was in the stands, and the entire time Stroud had the ball, she was visibly praying, moving her lips, saying God bless him and other prayers, Laura recalled. “She was barely even watching. As a mom, I think you could relate to that so much.” And then, after one particularly nice play, Stroud came off the field and looked up directly to where his mother was sitting. They had a moment of seeing each other, and the team was able to catch it on video. “It still gives me chills to talk about it,” Laura said. “These NFL players, they are icons. They are the best in the world at their sport. But at the end of the day, they are still human and still want to see their moms in the stands.”

Laura now knows sports inside and out, with countless hours of live broadcasting under her belt. She’s mastered the art of thinking on her feet in front of millions of viewers. Yet, she admits, she still feels the need to over-research, over-prepare—and yes, she still gets anxious before the red light flicks on. “I’m panic-googling things before the game. I’m sure some people watch and think, ‘She has it all figured out,’ and it’s like, no, you have no idea I was so worried and nervous I couldn’t sleep last night. I was thinking of all the ways I could mess this up. That’s only human.”

As a host, she enjoys making the people on the show with her shine and forging positivity with her team and her viewers.

“There’s enough bad stuff going on in the world. Sports can be a bit of an escape for people,” she said.

She has also been surprised to find that she has inspired others to try to follow in her footsteps. People often approach her to say they want to do what she does because of her. “I never would have thought that people would say that about me,” she said. “I don’t take for granted any of these young women or men who I can help pull along. It’s a real gift to be in a position like that.”

Her advice to up-and-comers: be comfortable with making mistakes. Take as many opportunities as possible to get on live TV, and know you will make mistakes. “I’m a person who is not very good at making mistakes,” she said. “I’m a perfectionist.” It was hard to accept that messing up on live television was part of the job. Everyone does it. She just had to learn how to get past it. “In some ways, though, it still bugs me like crazy when I make mistakes. Finding ways to move past that was a turning point in my career.”

Laura also advises young people not to think the best way to get ahead is to do something attention-grabbing or anything to get noticed. “Ultimately, staying power comes in credibility and class and being kind and all those things that seem like maybe they wouldn’t get you ahead, but I can tell you that they will. It’s just about the patience to get there.”

Despite her workload, Laura still makes it to the beach every year. Her husband’s family owns a house in Destin, Florida, near where she grew up. “That beach is where so many of my most special memories are with my family, with my brothers,” she said. “Walking on that white sand, seeing that beautiful water—it still feels just like it did more than 20 years ago when we were all there together.

Follow Laura on Facebook and Instagram for updates, insights, and a glimpse into her life on and off the field.