KATHERINE ELLIS IS "OUT OF HIS LEAGUE"

By: Holly Arend

It’s time to look at Game Days from a new point of view, and Katherine Ellis is here to make it happen. As the host of Out Of His League, Katherine is shining a spotlight on women in sports, offering a fresh perspective that celebrates their contributions both on and off the field. With her signature style and passion, she’s breaking down barriers and redefining how we see women in the sports world. In this interview, we’ll dive into her mission, her journey, and the impact she hopes to make.

1. What inspired you to start the "Out of His League" series, and how do you

choose the women you feature?

I don’t actually remember having one singular “lightbulb” moment where this

great idea came to me super clearly out of thin air. I think it’s something that developed in my head over time as I naturally experienced moments of being impressed with women I’d see and meet in the sports world and also the growing interest from the public in said women involved in sports. I have spent my whole life as far as I can remember involved in sports in one way or another, and working in sports since high school, so the amount of incredible people, specifically women, I have met throughout my life in this world is really countless. I was probably organically telling my family and friends about a girl I had met who had my dream job or how this woman had a breakthrough moment in her specific field and just felt like I wanted to tell more people about it. I do remember one specific “ah-ha” moment and that was when I started seeing my sister, who Couldn’t care less about football, become the world’s biggest Kansas City Chiefs fan in what seemed like overnight. We were born and raised in New England and have never celebrated anything but the Patriots and Super Bowls, so when she started taking over the family television last year to put on Chiefs games I was floored to be honest. Thanks to Taylor Swift, my sister was not only watching football, she was voluntarily watching it OVER some of her favorite reality TV show premieres, dropping statistics and facts that even I didn’t know about, and making the rest of the family come and cheer on Travis Kecle with her. This is

the same girl who a year prior had almost never watched a Superbowl and would leave the room when we put a sports game on because she was so disinterested and now she was setting up our DVR recordings to not miss a second. I realized that if she could quickly become that interested in sports, other girls could too. I’ve always felt like a “translator” for her and my other super girly friends to explain what is going on in the sports world to them in “girl language” and figured that maybe I need to bring this kind of

“storytelling” to a bigger audience.

2. How did your time as a reporter for BU's hockey team shape your perspective

on sports reporting?

It was very interesting because the year before I was the reporter I was the

team manager which was a much more time-consuming role. I was at the rink

every day 2 hours before practice and 2 hours after. I traveled with the team to every game even to Ireland during Thanksgiving. I missed out on so many events and weekends in college to work for the team. Because of the amount of time I spent with the team and staff, I built really strong relationships with everyone as human beings. There were times when I knew what was going on with players' family lives and why it might be affecting their gameplay on the ice. Getting to know the athletes and coaches as human beings before my job switched to reporting about them made it really important to me to always put the humans that they are before their sports analytics. I think this was a rare approach, especially in the first year of my career on-camera reporting, but it was important to me and really shifted my perspective on what stories were important to share when reporting. This core value of mine has stuck with me

today in the types of sports content I share and I always try to remind fans and viewers that even when helmets go on, athletes are human beings with real feelings and emotions too, just like you and I.

3. What do you enjoy most about creating sports content, and how do you keep

Is your commentary fresh and engaging?

Sports have always been a part of my life and I know always will be. There’s a camaraderie about them that unites people and cities together which is a really beautiful thing that I love. My life is constantly changing day to day between my career in sports media and because of my long-time boyfriend’s career of being an athlete, there’s no way to describe what’s going on in my life without mentioning the direct impact that sports are having on it. There’s no way to say to my friends “Hey I'm actually in your city for one day” or “I don’t know what country I'm living next fall” or “my boyfriend’s job transferred him immediately and suddenly I'm gone” without saying the truth of the sports impact which is really “I got invited by this sports team last minute to go shoot with them tomorrow in this city” or “Jake got traded and we’re moving from North Carolina to Illinois in 3 hours”. When it comes to content about my life, it’s really just me being open and honest about whatever situation I’m in currently experiencing (which is definitely fresh because we stay on our toes over here). Even when I was heartbroken that Jake got traded last season because of the friendships I made and the life I had built with his previous team, I posted how I was truly feeling to show it is absolutely not all sunshine and rainbows in this lifestyle that I feel is so overly glamorized - which was

that I was struggling with packing up our entire apartment and puppy by myself and mentally I was so sad my first week in the new city’s team because I felt so alone. That’s just me oversharing my honest feelings and I think it was relatable to a lot of people and how they may be feeling when moving somewhere new. When it comes to sports content that has nothing to do with my life, I just post my thoughts and feelings about the sports. I think it feels like a unique viewpoint because people post about sports on social media are usually mega fans or analytical reporters who know all of the X’s and O’s of the sports, not girly girls who are half interested and just want to know what celebrities are at the game and what outfits they’re wearing. I try to take my knowledge of the game and “pop culture-if” it for my girlfriends to make it interesting to them even though they might not care about the game statistics as much as superfans.

4. How do you balance being a fan of the sport with maintaining a professional

perspective in your commentary?

I think as long as it’s not my boyfriend’s team, I’m able to be professional commentating about it. I’ve learned through trial (and error), that I am most certainly the least unbiased in the building when he’s playing and emotions will get involved. I’ve stopped live tweeting his games when I'm fired up which helped with this. Until he’s retired, my biggest professional weakness will be that there will be 1 team I should never commentate on (publically at least). Everyone else, I can put rivalries aside and be balanced. I definitely learned this from my dad who was a Boston College hockey player who literally had a gigantic eagle tattoo covering his forearm and had (Sucks to BU) in his blood, until I started working for Boston University’s hockey team and he literally showed up to the BC alumni golf tournament with a Boston (University) Terrier decal sticker on his car. Blood is thicker than rivalries.

5. What inspired you to create Chicks University at Barstool Sports, and how

did you envision it contributing to the Barstool brand?

When I got to Barstool, I was assigned to create content that no one else there was currently covering. Which felt nearly impossible because Barstool has one of the leading shows for every sport and entertainment category ever. I collaborated with multiple brands there like Spittin Chiclets, Gametime, Barstool Uncut on Snapchat, KFC Radio, etc. but I needed to find my own unique identity. At the time, it felt like no one was making content specifically for college-aged girls so that was the brand angle I created. When I started it, I was only a week out of college and felt like I had the world’s best senior advice for all of the incoming freshmen babies and wanted to tell them everything I would tell my younger sister if I had one. It started super strong engagement-wise, but I quickly felt like I was struggling to come up with new episode ideas. Until you’re out of college, you never realize how quickly you “grow up” and suddenly don't care anymore about how to get invited to frat parties and what to wear to class. The unfortunate truth was that the longevity potential for the brand wasn’t there unless there was a new host every year who was a senior keeping it fresh, or if I just kept going back to college but I don’t need any more loans so we were all set with that. It’s funny, when my intern contract was up I pretty much stormed into Dave’s office to ask him for an extension. I remember the other employees telling me that was insane of me to do. One said I had “the biggest balls in the office” because requesting a meeting with the CEO as an intern is kind of psychotic behavior from me to be fair. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from that conversation. He said something along the lines of “You need to make content about what you’re interested in. All of the most successful people here are covering topics they are passionate about and care about. If you don’t care about what you’re making content about, why would anyone else care?”. That was a huge lightbulb for me that I needed to change what I thought I should be making content about. It took a lot of time off and brainstorming to get to where I am now today, but now my new show is the most passionate I have ever felt about a piece of content creation and I am genuinely so thankful I got that advice to make me dig deep about the digital

footprint I wanted to be making.

6. What are your future goals for your series and sports commentary career?

Are any new projects in the works?

My biggest goal is to keep bridging the gap between the world’s most girly girls and the nitty-gritty roughness of sports. I think the progress that’s been made over the last couple of years with the growing interest of females in sports has been incredible and I want to have a big part in that. I’m actively working on it via social media, but specifically speaking when it comes to goals one of my biggest near-sighted ones is to create public in-person events for the girls at sports games. I can perfectly envision having a pregame party all together meeting new friends, talking about everything that has nothing to

do with the game we’re going to watch after, and teaching people just one new thing about the game they might not have known before being there that day. I think one of the most intimidating things about sports is feeling like you know nothing, but I think that is so fun to have the opportunity to learn and pick teams to root for from scratch. That’s SO much better than if you were born into a life filled with rooting for a disappointing sports team like New Yorkers have to do.

7. How do you see the role of women in sports evolving, and what part do you

hope to play in that change?

It’s hard to envision what women are going to do next because 5 years ago I would be on the floor stunned over all of the incredible things females have newly accomplished in the sports industry. In sports the individual athlete accomplishments we’ve seen and league-wide the WNBA and PWHL progress has been astronomical, women I personally know getting jobs in broadcasting they’ve been training for for decades, and WAG’s making more money than their pro athlete partners due to their social media presence, female coaches and agents and referees breaking ground they’ve never even stood on before - It’s really such a beautiful thing to watch and genuinely brings tears to my eyes. I hope to help people realize that if their dream role doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. It just means they have to create it themselves. I think the generations before us were very used to entering the workforce at the bottom and spending their careers slowly working their way up. Now more than ever we really have the opportunity to pave our own way and invent new positions that have never existed. I hope by sharing the stories of all of my guests on “Out Of His League” I can give women the confidence and realization that they can make it in any area that they want to, regardless of how big the “man’s world” feels.

A huge thank you to Katherine Ellis for sharing her journey with us today! Be sure to catch her show, Out Of His League, on YouTube, where she’s redefining the role of women in sports. And don’t miss her exclusive cover story, coming out in October, where we’ll dive even deeper into her inspiring path and what’s next on her horizon.