In March of 1995, as the women's NCAA Tournament was approaching, ESPN called Debbie Antonelli to offer her a job as a color analyst for the regional round of March Madness. They told her she was going to be partnering with Beth Mowins, who would handle play-by-play duties.
Antonelli's first response was, "Who?"
"I had no idea," she recalls now. "I had never heard of her."
Antonelli declined that gig because she had just had a baby. But in the fall of 1996, she heard Mowins' name again, this time from a local TV station in Pennsylvania that wanted her to call Penn State women's basketball games. This time, she accepted.
On Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1996, Antonelli and Mowins were the voices on Penn State's 76-62 win over Seton Hall. Angie Potthoff scored 21 points in the victory for theNittany Lionsin what would be the first of countless women's college basketball games Antonelli and Mowins have called together.
This is the 30th season the duo has been telling the story of women's college basketball. At a time where the sport is growing by leaps and bounds in viewership and attendance, fans know when they see Antonelli and Mowins that they are tuning into an important game.
"They've been trailblazers as broadcasters," ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips told USA Today Sports. "It's hard for me to think of a better combination than Debbie and Beth and what they've meant. I just think they are the gold standard and it gives me great comfort when I watch a game they're on. I don't know if they have any peers that I'm aware of that have quite done what they've done."
Antonelli and Mowins went from not knowing each other to close friends. After traveling the country together for three decades, sketching out ideas on bar napkins after games and vacationing together with their families, they can finish each other's sentences. They have a routine that's second nature. Even while sitting in a green room in Colonial Life Arena in South Carolina, Antonelli sat on the left side of the couch while Mowins sat on the right — just as they would be if they were courtside at a broadcast table.
"She's a part of our family. She's watched my boys grow up," Antonelli said of Mowins. "I prep a certain way when I work with Beth, because I don't have to worry about the other things and that allows me to do what I really am good at, which is taking a deeper dive. We tell you the how and why."
'Wild wild west' of women's basketball
Antonelli's path to television began when she was 23-years-old. After playing basketball for the Hall of Fame coach Kay Yow at NC State — she was on a Wolfpack team that won the ACC regular season and tournament championships in 1986 — Antonelli went to work at the University of Kentucky as director of marketing for the athletic department. A local TV station approached the Wildcats with the idea of producing and televising some of their games. Antonelli not only convinced them to do women's basketball, but persuaded them to let her be on the broadcast as an analyst.
A few years later, Antonelli took a similar job at Ohio State and, again, struck up conversations with the local cable company. Antonelli soon became the voice of Buckeyes women's basketball games across Ohio.
"I was like, 'Wow, this is just like everything I thought coaching would be, except you don't deal with the players,'" Antonelli told USA Today Sports. "It had everything else. Watching film, prep, practice, you know, all the things that I love about the job. It ran parallel with my interest in growing the game."
Mowins' path was a bit more traditional. Her dad was a coach and she played college basketball at Lafayette College where she set program records for assists in a single season and career. She then went to Syracuse's Newhouse School and not long after graduating with her master's degree, became the play-by-play voice for a Big East women's basketball game of the week shown on six different cable outlets in the northeast in the early 1990s.
ESPN, which is based in Bristol, Connecticut, is nestled in the heart of the Big East footprint.
"The Big East Network saw me doing Syracuse games, and I started doing the Big East Game of the Week, and those were on in Connecticut, and ESPN saw me doing those. And then it just kind of grew from there," Mowins told USA Today Sports. "Back in those days, it was the wild wild west."
Mowins said when she and Antonelli first started working together, they would call several games a week in different time zones for multiple different networks. They were women's basketball broadcasting mercenaries. They might be at Michigan State working a CBS game on a Saturday, then fly to North Carolina for a Duke game on ESPN on Sunday, then to New York for a St. John's game for the Big East, then to Texas to do a broadcast for Fox Sports Southwest.
"Shoot, I'd be gone for three weeks at a time," Antonelli says. "It was a hustle."
"But we were young, we were hungry, we were working on our craft," Mowins says. "And probably staying out too late."
"We would meet the coaches after the game for a drink. We'd make them buy," Antonelli says. "We did all that before the internet, before phone cameras. … When it comes to making postgame arrangements, I make those."
"After carrying her for two hours, I'm exhausted," Mowins says with a laugh. "I don't want to have to make any decisions after that."
Antonelli was a freelancer for the first 28 years of her television career. These days, she's mainly calling games for ESPN and its partners on the ACC and SEC networks, typically working one men's game and two women's games a week. There are times where her schedule gets stacked up, like when she called nine games in a 14-day span earlier this season.
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Mowins stays busy as the college sports seasons cross over. In the fall she calls college football, and in the spring she's the play-by-play host of the Women's College World Series. Since joining ESPN in 1994, Mowins has called NCAA Championships in basketball, softball, soccer and volleyball. In 2017, she became the first woman to call a nationally televised NFL game when she did a Monday Night Football broadcast between the Chargers and Broncos.
For many young women in broadcasting Mowins isn't just a role model, she's the standard.
"She has always been someone to aspire to and learn from, but she's also someone who has given me hope in the incredibly wild world that is being a woman in sports," says Mia O'Brien, an ESPN Radio host based in Jacksonville, Florida. "As I've strived to grow as a play-by-play announcer, it's made me respect Beth tenfold. It's been difficult for me to find reps today in the 2020s, so I can't even begin to imagine what her road to national prominence entailed."
'I know nothing except for hoops'
Antonelli has one of the sharpest minds in basketball. Part of that could be due to the fact that basketball is all Antonelli consumes, which is why Mowins' pop culture references fly over her head.
"I know nothing except for hoops," Antonelli says. "I don't watch any shows. I watch basketball."
Mowins likens Antonelli's ability to dissect X's and O's to Tony Romo and Dan Orlovsky on NFL broadcasts, in that she can predict what is about to happen on the court.
"Very few people have that ability, to not only have it stored in there, but then to bring it out when it's appropriate. Debbie is in that group that is just extraordinary because of the way she prepares," Mowins says. "She has relationships with all of the coaches. One of the most significant things is, if Debbie calls somebody, they're going to pick up."
In addition to the thousands of women's basketball games that she's called on television, Antonelli has also been the radio analyst for Westwood One's broadcasts of the Final Four for 30 years. In 2022, Antonelli joined her college coach, Yow, in the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.
Wherever she goes, the folks most proud of what Antonelli has accomplished in growing the game of women's basketball seem to be at her alma mater, NC State.
"She's one of the premier announcers, and I'm telling you, she works harder than anybody I know. She's got irons in a lot of fires," NC State head coach Wes Moore said of Antonelli. "She does her homework. She knows going into a game what she wants to talk about and cover."
'Like an old married couple'
Over three decades, Antonelli and Mowins estimate they've called around 30 games per year together. With that many to choose from, it's difficult for them to pinpoint the most memorable game.
The first that came to mind for Antonelli was during the COVID-impacted season of 2020-21. On Dec. 15, 2020, Antonelli and Mowins were two of the few people in the building when Stanford beat Pacific, pushing Tara VanDerveer ahead of Pat Summitt to become the all-time winningest women's college basketball coach.
For Mowins, a trip to North Carolina's Research Triangle sticks out, when on Feb. 1, 2003, No. 2 UConn upset No. 1 Duke in a sold-out Cameron Indoor Stadium.
"We hit the heyday of the ACC in the early 2000s. Every weekend was a top 20 matchup," Mowins says. "For years, those Triangle schools had tried to build up fanbases, and when UConn came to Cameron Indoor it was like a men's game. The students all turned out."
A photo from that game of Diana Taurasi preparing to throw an inbounds pass with Alana Beard defending her appeared in Sports Illustrated the next week. If you look closely at it and spot a woman wearing a red sweater, that's Mowins' mother sitting near Antonelli's parents.
Three decades into broadcasting women's college basketball, Antonelli and Mowins still have a passion for the games, the players and the coaches.
And they show no signs of slowing down. This weekend they'll be calling games together in Duluth, Georgia, at the ACC Tournament and will be paired again during March Madness.
The duo has lost count of exactly how many games they've done together.
"I would certainly say it feels like it's been 1,000 games," Mowins says.
"And I would say one of us deserves a medal," Antonelli says. "The other one might need therapy."
"I think that's something that sort of sets our chemistry apart," Mowins says. "When we're working together, we're not afraid to pick at each other, you know, like an old married couple."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:The voices behind the rise of women's college basketball
