Last year ESPN made its triumphant return as a media rights holder for the NHL, and among some of the more notable moves the network made was including female voices on its broadcast crews.
But Leah Hextall, who even led play-by-play during ESPN's coverage of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, said it wasn't such a wonderful experience.
Talking to Richard Deitsch on his podcast Sports Media with Richard Deitsch, Hextall said she was unwelcome in a lot of different settings in the league. That compounded many of the vile and sexist messages and threats she received for just doing the job.
"To me, you add that on to the fact that then I didn't feel welcomed in some press boxes, and I didn't feel welcomed at some rinks and in some conversations," she said. "I realized that I was once again the lone woman and the outsider looking in, and I wasn't one of the boys and I wasn't going to be no matter how hard I tried."
Hextall gave a presentation earlier in the summer that spotlighted a lot of what she went through. She said she was a survivor and elaborated more on what she meant by that.
"It was just, to me, that I survived that, that I survived the mental attacks, I survived the outside attacks from social media, I survived the internal attacks from other people within the hockey world, I survived attacks from some of my colleagues not at ESPN but just different things I heard," she said.
The comments, threats and treatment she received took its toll. Hextall said she struggled with having to keep all of that stuff private.
"I have been really taught that in this industry, keep your head down, do the work and don't draw attention to yourself because this is just something you have to deal with. You have to deal with it," she said. "But I've also never wanted to draw attention to myself in that way, because I didn't want to give that person the satisfaction of retweeting that or sharing this on my social media platform because I also don't want people to think I'm complaining. I know I'm not complaining but that's how it looks like."
"Because of that, I kept a lot of this silent," she added.
But with a new season on the horizon, Hextall said she's going to have a different approach. She's not going to be fearful of making sure people know the types of things she's subjected to.
"This season I think I will have a different mentality about it," she said. "I would think more about passing it along when somebody references a threat or knowing where I live or something like that because at the end of the day, as my brother in-law who's a cop says, you don't know that they don't need this. And if you get enough of them, maybe it's time to start making people be held accountable for what they think is OK and how they treat people."
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