Brunch honoring 2007 Mary Garber Pioneer Award recipient Julie Ward, USA TODAY deputy managing editor By Jenny Vrentas
2007 AWSM intern at the Newark Star-Ledger AWSM’s 2007 Mary Garber Pioneer Award winner, Julie Ward, delivered perhaps the most important message of the 20th anniversary convention: Women in sports media have certainly advanced from the starting block, but there is still a long course ahead. “I look back, and I’m glad we’ve come so far,” Ward said. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think we’d be farther along.” “Progress is hard, but why does it have to be so damn slow?” she asked.
Ward has traveled the path women in sports media have had to take over the past 20 years. After reporting sports for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, she joined USA TODAY in 1984. She has been there ever since. She has coordinated coverage of numerous sports for the paper, including the NBA, golf and tennis, and she currently oversees the projects desk. Proof of Ward’s pioneer status — putting her in the “Conestoga Wagon age group,” as she joked — is that she had to work past restricted access as a female sports writer, not just to the locker room but also to the press box. While writing for the Globe-Democrat, she wasn’t allowed into the Busch Stadium press box. The head of the Baseball Writers Association noticed and finally slipped her a pass. On her first night in the box, she wore a Tahiti print skirt from Neiman Marcus, she recalled, and the highest heels she could find to make it clear a woman was present. Thanks to the efforts of individuals like Ward, women in sports encounter fewer arbitrary roadblocks. But, as she pointed out, while women account for 51 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise less than 13 percent of sports staff personnel at the country’s newspapers, according to a study commissioned by the Associated Press Sports Editors and released last year. Ward concluded by listing the things she hoped the room of women could find in each other, among them someone to counsel you, cry with you, rejoice with you and sometimes share cat stories. “Best of all,” she continued, “someone who can hire you.” She added: “This is a group of women I admire, for your resilience, fortitude and all your wonderful, wonderful talents.” Back | 
