Golden chances: Kerith Burke’s broadcasting career started at WSU and has taken her from one basketball dynasty to another

OAKLAND, Calif. – The oft-scrutinized back-to-back road games that have become such a hellish part of the NBA schedule aren’t as much of a nuisance for Kerith Burke.

She’s a rookie in NBA terms, but the Golden State Warriors’ sideline reporter has led a nomadic life since her childhood, hopping from one military station to the next as the U.S. Army moved her father – a member of the Ranger battalion – to different outposts throughout the country. A stint in Fort Lewis, Washington, then one in Fort Benning, Georgia, another in upstate New York, back down to Georgia and then back over to Washington.

“So, the longest I’ve lived anywhere has been five years,” Burke said.

Sure puts those three-game, five-day NBA road trips into perspective.

Burke has settled down for now, in the Bay Area, with the most popular basketball team on the globe and a job that 90 percent of her peers in the industry might take if handed the opportunity. Pretty good for someone who was shoveling watermelons into plastic bags at Whole Foods Market a year earlier just to cover her living expenses.

“I had to scrap for awhile,” Burke said. “… There’s 30 of us that do this job … we all know what we celebrate because this is a pretty cool life to have this kind of job.”

You don’t have to be a social butterfly to thrive in Burke’s role. But you have to be personable. And approachable.

She’s constantly digging for new stories, angles and human-interest pieces in order to feed Golden State’s rampant fan base and fill airspace during multi-hour broadcasts – not to mention pregame shows, postgame shows and other segments that consume her days. One minute, she’s quizzing megastars like Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant. The next she’s getting to know the story of a middle-school-aged boy who posted a perfect 4.0 GPA to earn coveted NBA playoff tickets.

At a young age, Burke learned she needed to be outgoing to adapt to new environments and assimilate into new friend groups with her family constantly on the move.

“Because if you don’t learn how to talk to people, you don’t have friends,” she said. “Army bases are an amazing place because it’s a melting pot of people. All types of cultures, all walks of life and they were classmates and you don’t think anything of it. And it’s so cool to grow up in that environment.”

Burke looks back fondly on her Ranger-base hopping childhood. She has vivid recollections of the steamy summer days in Fort Benning, where military children are afforded a special privilege on their 10th birthday.

“What that was for me, was going to the officers’ club pool,” she said. “Once you turn 10 years old, you can go by yourself, so me and a bunch of the neighborhood kids would pedal our little bikes to the O-Club pool. We’d spend all day there, then we’d go home and that was every day in the summer.”

Burke had returned to western Washington when it came time to choose a college – a decision that was influenced in part by a conversation with her parents about the merits of in-state tuition and in part by her desire to become a reporter.

Washington State and the Murrow School of Communication checked off both, making it an easy choice.

Burke was sure her future would be in storytelling, but it wasn’t clear which medium she’d pursue. So she sampled everything.

Burke began working at Cable 8 Productions – the official TV station at WSU – as a freshman and stuck with it all four years. But she also found serenity in the small, compact radio booth at KZUU 90.7 FM, where she was able to unplug every Friday, hosting a music show in the wee hours of the morning.

“It was like the worst time, but it’s three hours alone to shape your music knowledge and pretend people are listening. I absolutely loved it,” she said. “… I’ve always known that reporting in whatever shape would be my destiny.”

But it took a process of trial-and-error for Burke to discover that destiny would be sports-specific.

Burke, who still credits Murrow College professors Elizabeth Hindman and Glenn Johnson as influential mentors and loudly blurts “Go Cougs” whenever she sees Klay Thompson’s WSU jersey at Oracle Arena, accepted her first job out of college at a television station in Pasco. As a general assignment reporter, she didn’t mind seeking out human-interest stories, but wasn’t as comfortable hunting for hard news – house fires, corruption stories, etc.

“I was too sensitive to chase the scanner, to do the ugly stories, which you have to do as a reporter,” Burke said.

One thing led to another and Burke eventually became the station’s interim sports director. Call it the first quarter of a prosperous career in sports broadcasting.

Either Burke has a thing for dynastic basketball franchises, or they have a way of finding her.

She worked in Pasco and then Boise before moving to the other side of the country to take a job in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she covered a pair of ACC basketball juggernauts, Duke and North Carolina, along with their Hall of Fame coaches, Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams.

As Burke’s career moved on, the media markets got bigger and so did the basketball giants. Her next job took her to Sportsnet New York (SNY), where she worked the sideline for the UConn women and simultaneously hosted the “Geno Auriemma Show.”

Consider Burke the fourth pickup of UConn’s 2012 recruiting class. She arrived at the same time as Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck – a trio that would capture four consecutive national championships for the Huskies from 2013-16. Burke saw each of those championship games.

“Best recruiting class in not just women’s college basketball history, but when you see their stats at the end, you could argue it was period,” she said. “So four years, four national championships, hitched to their story. I’m glad I got to be a part of that in the tiniest way, but it’s their story, history. It’s incredible.”

She’s often asked about her interactions with the Huskies’ coach, Auriemma, who’s as polarizing a figure as you’ll find in college basketball – the women’s side and probably the men’s, too. Burke spent four seasons with the UConn coach in Storrs, then covered Auriemma’s U.S. gold-medal winning women’s team at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

“Is he a jerk?” happens to be the inquiry Burke gets most often.

“And the answer is no, he’s definitely not,” she said. “He’s really somebody that, talking to him for the coaches show made me a smarter basketball consumer. He’s a genius, but he’s also like talking to your grandfather about things. He’s a very warm personality.”

Burke also has some thoughts on the debate that seems to surround the UConn women every year – typically around the month of the March. Has their dominance tarnished the sport?

Burke’s conclusion: “Don’t get angry at the victors, challenge them and meet their standard.”

The next move of Burke’s career was the first one that wasn’t made with her career in mind. Her boyfriend – and now fiancé of four-plus months – had been living and working in the Bay Area. Without a single job lead, she willingly moved across the country to get closer.

Burke reached out to the Pac-12 Networks, but there were no immediate openings. They offered her scattered freelance work, and Burke took it, but knew she’d need something more stable.

“I just finished up five years in the nation’s No. 1 market, I covered the Olympics, I didn’t have a job when I moved here and I wondered, is this end of sports for me?” Burke said. “I didn’t want it to be and I really struggled with that, but I thought if this is the end of my career, my sports career, I think I’m OK with what I’ve accomplished. Then I had a tough eight-month span. Eight or nine months, working on my plan B, my plan C.”

Whole Foods wouldn’t have been Burke’s plan Y or Z, but she took a temporary job bagging groceries while she etched out her career plan. She wrote in an online diary about her first week at the “fancy-pants grocery store,” wryly describing the type of people who shop at Whole Foods and detailing her days at the organic market.

“I’ve been settling into shifts and getting a sense for the job,” she wrote on May 19, 2017. “I’m stunned I can work here if I don’t know what kombucha is. The organic overlords haven’t noticed yet.”

Another passage: “My favorite shift is closing. I like glaring at the people who linger in the eating area after the store is closed. In my mind, I’m letting them know this isn’t a restaurant. In my actions, I’m stacking the chairs as close as I can to where they’re sitting.”

Burke’s wit and writing ability caught the eyes of a nearby public relations firm, which gave a full-time job and better financial security while she continued to ponder her career.

A moment of clarification came for Burke that summer, on a sweltering day in the Bay Area while she and her boyfriend were attending a San Francisco Giants baseball game.

“He was like, ‘Would you rather do PR or would you rather do what the jumbotron reporter is doing on a hot day?’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘I want the reporter job.’”

Burke had kept a steady eye on the Warriors’ sideline reporter job, which opened last offseason when Rosalyn “Ros” Gold-Onwude took a job at Turner Sports to cover the NBA on a national level. Burke had subbed for Gold-Onwude before, so her credentials weren’t foreign to the executives who’d be hiring for the vacancy.

“For somebody just kind of stepping in, there’s a bunch of eyeballs on our show now and so that certainly changes the profile of everything,” said Phil Pollicino, producer for NBCS Authentic in the Bay Area. “And she did great. She was incredibly composed and held herself great and did a really good job.”

Burke is nearing the end of year one with the defending champions. She’ll travel with the Warriors to Houston for Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals on Monday and stick with them until they lose – or perhaps the more likely scenario, capture a third NBA championship in four years.

You’d think there’d be a frightening aspect of covering the sport’s biggest icons – especially for someone still relatively new to the NBA waters. But Burke considers herself lucky. The culture of the NBA’s most successful club allows Golden State’s leading scorer to feel the same level of comfort as its first-year sideline reporter.

“You talk about Steph Curry, who’s the most mild-mannered global superstar in the world,” Burke said. “He treats every single person the same and he has time for every person. Who does that? How does he do that? I’m just so impressed with who he is and who the people are here.”

“They really are the blueprint for success and it wasn’t always that way.”

Burke, in her own right, has created a blueprint for the model sideline reporter, though she’s insisted she’s trying to put her own stamp on the job. Still, if the model is hard work and professionalism, Burke has set a pretty good standard.

“To her credit, she has stuck with what probably got her this job,” Pollicino said. “She’s incredibly professional, she is very consistent, she digs for stories and finds stuff on her own and she’s just kind of solid.”

She’s entrenched in a dream job. It doesn’t mean she’ll stop scrapping.