Alyssa Lang is a rising star at ESPN. Her time in Columbia helped her get there
ESPN analyst Alyssa Lang slips into a plastic chair at a desk branded with fellow analyst Paul Finebaum’s name outside the Wynfrey Hotel’s Ballroom C.
It’s the second day of SEC Football Media Days in Hoover, Alabama and Lang has just stepped away from the on-air set tucked into the back right corner of the grand room serving as the event’s home base.
While SEC Media Days has been scaled down due to COVID-19-related restrictions in 2021, there’s still a layer of controlled chaos to the affair. Reporters race across the carpet coated in varying geometric patterns of blue and brown with as much order and organization as a stampede of elephants.
Writers clutch recording devices and notepads in either hand, while television reporters haul tripods under one arm and sling cameras over their shoulders.
The bright lights of the SEC Network’s stage are just around the corner of the table Lang sits at and just close enough to hear Finebaum firing off prognostications about the upcoming football season as ESPN’s cameras roll.
“Being here now is truly just a dream come true,” Lang said as an ear-to-ear smile graced her face. “And I’m hoping I don’t wake up any point in the next couple of years.”
Lang relishes the spectacle of the annual event. There’s even a level of comfort in it. SEC Media Days, to Lang, serve as a yearly reminder of the days when she ran around the second floor of the Wynfrey Hotel as an intern and later a weekend sports anchor at WLTX in Columbia while an undergrad at South Carolina.
“She’s somebody that if you can imagine just one of your home girls that you grew up with in high school — that is Alyssa Lang,” fellow SEC Network analyst Roman Harper told The State. “She’s one of the coolest people ... in the work environment I can imagine.”
LANG LANDS IN BROADCASTING
In just six years, Lang has become one of the faces of the SEC Network. She hosts studio shows, offers sideline commentary during football season and, on this day, is helping anchor ESPN’s coverage of SEC Media Days.
But for someone who’s been thrust into the national spotlight not far removed from her own college graduation, there’s a gratitude and appreciation in her voice.
Lang’s cognizant of the place she holds as part of ESPN’s star-studded college football lineup, yet she also maintains the realness and effervescent personality those in Columbia recall so clearly.
“She is the same person that I remember,” WLTX sports director Reggie Anderson, who served as one of Lang’s first bosses, told The State. “Some people get off to the big time and they forget about the steps along the way to get her there. And she’s been the (same).”
That Lang has landed as one of the leading young voices in college football is as much fate as it is happenstance.
During a parent-teacher conference during her high school years, her public speaking teacher approached her mom and dad with the belief she could stick as a broadcaster. Lang delivered her speeches in class with grace and ease. There was no underlying panic or fear that usually accompanied kids of her age speaking in front of classmates.
“I never really thought about it,” she conceded. “(But) when I would do my speeches in class, my friends would be like, ‘Oh no. I’m going to puke. I’m so nervous. I’m sweating.’ And I was always just like, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ It never really made me nervous.”
Lang was enamored by football as a kid. Fall weekends in her youth were spent trekking from her Charlotte area home to Blacksburg for Virginia Tech football games, where both her parents were alumni.
As an elementary school student, she even challenged her classmates on the rules of the game.
“I always got into arguments at the lunch table about college football,” Lang said through a laugh. “And I’d come home and I’d tell my dad, like, ‘This kid in the third grade didn’t even know what a safety was and I had explain it to him.’ “
Hokie roots aside, Lang landed in Columbia as an undergrad at South Carolina. The feel of an SEC environment, she said, was different. The passion she’d grown accustomed to at Lane Stadium, though, compared.
Lang eventually secured a job as an intern at WLTX her sophomore year at South Carolina. That was later parlayed into full-time work as a weekend sports anchor while she was still in school.
Each day had a rhythm to it. Mornings were spent in class (including a freshman English seminar with USC legend Jadeveon Clowney). Afternoons were then reserved for time at the station driving up to Clemson, over to Williams-Brice Stadium and as far as Wake Forest chasing down stories and scoops.
“It’s a situation where if something came up where she had a class and she couldn’t go shoot something or that she couldn’t go to a certain event, it would be just fine,” Anderson said, “because I didn’t want her to flunk out.”
HEADING TO ESPN AND THE SEC NETWORK
Roman Harper leaned back in his chair in wonderment.
A 10-year NFL veteran and former standout safety at Alabama, Harper has spent ample time on sizable stages. But watching Lang — who was trading barbs over the air with Arkansas coach Sam Pittman — brought a semblance of amazement given the ease with which she tip-toed through the interview.
“She’s one of the first people that I actually got comfortable with on the set,” Harper said, “because she made it that easy.”
Now heading into her fourth football season with ESPN, Lang has become a mainstay on the SEC Network’s college football team.
After graduating from South Carolina in 2015, she continued full-time employment at WLTX into the next year. A spell covering the Jacksonville Jaguars, among other responsibilities, for First Coast News followed.
Nearing the end of her second year in Jacksonville, Lang received a text from a friend at ESPN who she’d met in college. They were curious if she’d be interested in auditioning for a role at the network. Lang responded in the affirmative.
A few weeks later she headed up to Charlotte for the audition. The trip was accompanied by a six-hour flight delay. Lang eventually landed around 3 a.m. — only five hours before her meeting.
The audition came and went. Lang readily admits she thought she bombed it. A handful of months passed. Another call from ESPN came. The job was hers.
“I cried at work,” Lang said. “It was the best day of my life.”
Lang has since worked in varying roles at SEC Network. ESPN announced last month she and fellow analysts Dari Nowkhah and Peter Burns had agreed to multi-year contract extensions.
Anderson still maintains regular communication with Lang. His 10- and 12-year-old sons also always point out when Lang and fellow former WLTX employee-turned-ESPN star Matt Barrie pop up on their TV screens.
Lang says there are layers to her role with ESPN that still don’t feel real. After all, she’s still only a few years removed from hauling a tripod and camera around the Wynfrey Hotel.
On this day, though, she’s the star perched at the anchor desk.
