Alyssa Lang admits the University of South Carolina wasn’t at the top of her list when she started looking at colleges. Now she can’t imagine her life and career trajectory if she hadn’t become a Gamecock.
The sideline reporter and broadcaster for the SEC Network and ESPN is a familiar face and voice to sports fans. And while she may not have known early on where she wanted to go to college, she did know that she loved sports — especially college football.
In high school, a teacher noticed her public speaking ability and mentioned it to her parents, suggesting a career that took advantage of her comfort level talking to groups.
“My parents were like, ‘Well, you are obsessed with sports. All you want to do is talk about sports to everyone who will listen.’ So they just put that idea (of sports broadcasting) in my head,” Lang says. “And ever since that seed was planted, I sort of became obsessed with it.”
Lang grew up in Huntersville, North Carolina, just north of Charlotte. Both of her parents went to Virginia Tech, her grandparents lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, and the family routinely made the 2½-hour trip on weekends.
When it came time to go to college, her heart pointed her to Virginia Tech. But her interest was journalism, not engineering. She set her sights on in-state UNC Chapel Hill, but that didn’t work out. The rejection led her to look at other colleges — and ended up being perhaps the best thing to happen for her career.
When she was offered a scholarship at USC, she made a second visit to Columbia.
“And I was like, ‘You know what? This actually feels like home and felt like home all along.’ By the end of the process, it was very clear to me that’s what was meant to happen. And I look back now and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, imagine if it had worked out any other way?’”
"The opportunities that were afforded to me at South Carolina, I just know I wouldn’t have seen those same opportunities anywhere else."
Once she arrived on campus, she jumped right into broadcast journalism. At the start-of-semester activities fair, she found Student Gamecock TV. By the summer after sophomore year, she landed an internship with WLTX in Columbia. That turned into a part-time job, which snowballed into working a variety of jobs at the TV station. By her senior year, she was anchoring weekend sports at WLTX — along with finishing a challenging senior semester in journalism.
“I would literally get in (to the journalism school newsroom) at 8 a.m. and then leave at 5 and go straight to WLTX and do whatever high school basketball game needed to be shot or anchor the 7 or the 11 (p.m. broadcasts). I would do that and then go back to senior semester the next morning.”
It wasn’t easy balancing her studies and her commitments at WLTX. But her professors and others at USC worked with her, helping support her transition from the classroom to the working world.
After graduating with her degree in broadcast journalism in 2015, Lang stayed at WLTX for more than a year, then moved on to a station in Jacksonville, Florida, as a sports anchor. After a few years in Florida, she was contemplating a career change. That’s when ESPN called — through a contact she made while she was a student at USC. He told her the network was looking to hire another host and suggested she apply. She interviewed at the SEC Network and ESPN studios in Charlotte and started the job in August 2018.
Since then, she’s hosted in-studio shows, delivered cut-in reports during games, built a reputation as a strong sideline reporter — and “goes wherever they send me,” she says. College football, the NBA, college baseball, softball — the list goes on.
This fall, her profile will be even higher at the network, as she moves into a role hosting ESPN’s Friday and Saturday college football wraparound shows from the network’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. She will continue to host SEC Now, the SEC Network’s flagship afternoon show, once a week.
As she marks 11 years in the sports news and broadcasting business, she is thriving and enjoying the work.
“I like the relationships,” Lang says. “It sounds maybe like a little bit corny, but it was something that I didn’t necessarily anticipate when I got into the business. I get to spend a lot of time in the SEC and you get to see the same faces over and over again, and you get to build relationships with athletes and coaches and their families and their wives and husbands and their kids. It is such a great reminder that it’s so much bigger than just the game that you’re covering. Lives really can be changed with a sport and with a platform.”
She says she is an example of someone whose path in life didn’t go exactly how she expected, starting with her college experience.
“I often think about my life if I had ended up at Chapel Hill or somewhere else,” she says. “The opportunities that were afforded to me at South Carolina, I just know I wouldn’t have seen those same opportunities anywhere else. And it’s funny because it wasn’t in my plan, but God knew what he was doing. So that’s really the main thing that I always tell people about my journey.”