Credit: Courtesy of Nicole Hutchison
As the NFL season approaches and college football teams ready for the fall, Nicole Hutchison deftly balances her work as team host for the Dallas Cowboys and a sideline reporter for HBCU GO, a digital platform broadcasting HBCU sports. Multitasking is nothing new to Hutchison, who as a student-athlete at Howard University balanced playing Division I tennis with internships that helped her build a resume in sports broadcasting.
“When I graduated from Howard University [in 2019], I got my first job, which was at MLB Network,” recalled the Houston native. “I got my reel together from there to go on air. I started applying for TV jobs, and I got my first opportunity in Alexandria, Louisiana, where I was covering LSU, which won a national championship that year. I got to cover the Saints a little bit.”
Hutchison’s father, Anthony Hutchison, played in the NFL, so she knows football well. Her next move was to Lexington, Kentucky, where she was a sports anchor/reporter covering the University of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, and high school sports for local news. In 2023, she moved to Dallas to be a team reporter and now also team host for the Cowboys. This position is year-round, including ongoing podcasts.
“We have our own in-house broadcast media team where we do shows,” Hutchison said. “I will be hosting the pregame shows and the postgame shows. I was already doing sit-down interviews with players, but now I will be doing both.”
Having attended and been a student-athlete at an HBCU, she feels an affinity for the student-athletes that HBCU GO covers. In addition to sideline reporting assignments during football season, Hutchison appears on the platform’s studio show during basketball season.
“For me, it’s always telling the stories,” she said. “It looks like that’s what they want to do more of, and that’s my specialty, telling the stories of athletes. Not just their successes on the field but finding interesting things about them.”
The one sport she hasn’t yet covered is the sport she played. “The dream is still to be a host on the Tennis Channel,” said Hutchison, who while competing for Howard’s women’s tennis program was named to the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) Tennis All-Academic Team in 2018 and 2019.
“The work with the Cowboys is so beneficial,” she added, “because the shows I get to do and the caliber of production and broadcasting they have equips me with the necessary skills. I love telling stories. I love interacting with athletes and finding the true meaning of why they do what they do.”
