The Utah Jazz have added new prospects.
So too has their TV broadcast.
The Smith Entertainment Group announced Wednesday that they’ve hired 25-year-old Lauren Green as their new sideline reporter. Green will travel with the team for all 82 games this regular season, reporting on stories around the Jazz during the team’s TV broadcasts on KJZZ and Jazz+.
Also announced on Wednesday was a changing of roles for Holly Rowe, who has spent the last three seasons as one of the team’s color commentators alongside Craig Bolerjack and Thurl Bailey. Rowe will no longer be in the team’s commentary booth, instead working as a storyteller on selected content throughout the season across media, such as her Front Rowe podcast. She’ll also feature on certain segments in the TV broadcast. Winner of the Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Media Award, Rowe will focus on her duties with ESPN, where she serves as its lead college football and WNBA sideline reporter, among other sports.
Introducing sideline reporter Lauren Green
Green has had two major passions in her life: track and journalism.
In both, seconds matter.
As an athlete, she was one of the fastest young runners in the West. She first competed in high school in New Mexico, where she says she was a “forget how many times state champion.” She ran a 12.56 second 100 meters at one meet, 25.16 seconds in the 200-meter race in another, and a 55.51 second 400-meter dash in yet another.
She ran track at the University of Nevada — chosen, she says, because of the school’s diverse journalism program, which involved TV, newspaper, podcasting, documentary making, and more. But she found her initial calling in delivering sports news to a wider audience.
“Track was my life for the longest time, and live TV is kind of the closest thing that I can get to feel the same amount of joy and intensity that I used to have when I was running a race,” Green said. “There is a fun, performative aspect that I like about being in front of the camera.”
Green further diversified her portfolio at Arizona State’s Cronkite School of Journalism, getting a master’s degree there while covering ASU’s basketball and track and field teams. While she attended the school, she covered the NBA’s summer league in Las Vegas, Steph Curry’s golf tournament, and more.
A chance meeting at the conference for the National Association of Black Journalists led to Green being hired as a weekend news anchor at New Mexico’s NBC affiliate, KOB4, where she’s worked for the last two years.
It was a competitive posting, Jazz Senior Vice President of Broadcasting Travis Henderson said, with “hundreds” of applicants for the job that involves months of travel with a professional sports team.
But Green stood out of the pack.
“In her news market in Albuquerque, she was on that daily sports grind of covering everything on her own,” Henderson said. “She was really scrappy in that sense, she did a lot of her own stuff, a lot of her own reporting, her own writing, her own everything.”
Without a traditional sideline reporter since Kristen Kenney’s departure, the team has relied on Bolerjack and Nayo Campbell to do locker room interviews, roles outside of their job descriptions.
Henderson said Green will improve the Jazz’s broadcast by providing more “details on some of the bigger stories that we’ve always covered — add some context and some coverage to things that maybe we couldn’t always dive as deep in, just because that wasn’t what we were doing.”
Green will also contribute significantly to pre-game, half-time, and post-game shows on KJZZ and Jazz+, including hosting select broadcasts.
It’s a significant job, but one Green said she is ready for.
“I’m going to be someone who’s at every open practice, every press conference. I’m always going to be around to see and observe everything with the Jazz and traveling to every road game,” she said. “I need to bring in this position really fine tuned storytelling for what the audience just can’t see. How can I present that in a way that’s personable but also trustworthy and just digestible for anybody that’s watching? That’s my goal.”
