How Sports Journalist Arielle Chambers Gets It Done

Well before the WNBA started breaking attendance and viewership records this season, sports journalist Arielle Chambers, who goes by Ari, championed the league. “The WNBA is so important,” Chambers first wrote on Facebook in 2016. She continued to use the phrase when she saw players “do dope things in the community” and it caught fire with fans. “It was ingrained in me at a young age that women’s basketball is super important,” Chambers tells me. “Even though I didn’t play myself, I grew up with the next generation of elite basketball players.”

As a teenager, Chambers got close to her best friend’s AAU league teammates, many of whom went on to play professionally. In the early 2010s, she started reaching out to those contacts, interviewed them, and posted the conversations on YouTube and Twitter. “It started by me organically talking to my friends,” Chambers says. “Back before companies were giving people resources to cover it, I was able to call them up and be like, ‘You’re in town? I’m going to come to your room and we’re going to record this interview and I’m going to post it.’” The videos quickly gained traction and landed Chambers her first sports writing job.

She went on to found HighlightHER, a platform dedicated to amplifying female athletes’ voices, in 2019. Today, Chambers covers women’s sports as a commentator for ESPN and Andscape, including on Hoop Streams. She also hosts the WNBA’s Off Top, and this summer she’ll be reporting for Team USA at the Olympics. Here’s how Chambers gets it all done.

On her morning routine: If it were up to me, I would sleep 15 hours. If I don’t set an alarm, I am not waking up. My dog wakes me up at like 5:30 a.m. He’s a 14-year-old Yorkie and does not care about my time or my peace. I’ll take him on a little walk, go back and take a nap, and then wake back up around 7:30 a.m. Then I have to have coffee. That’s a mandate for me every single day: Coffee and oat milk latte, no sugar, just espresso shots and oat milk. If I have a 10:00 a.m. call time, then I’ll head into the city around 8:30 a.m. and get another coffee. Don’t judge me.

On a typical workday:In sports you never really have two of the same days. It depends on the season, it depends on playoffs, it depends on what sport is going on. If I have Hoop Streams, for example, I will do a pre-tape at South Street Seaport. I will get to the studio around 10:00 a.m. for hair and makeup. I’ll record an interview with a player around 11-11:30 a.m. Then I’ll hit the road and commute by either car or train to Bristol, Connecticut, for around three more hours. We have a pre-production meeting once we get there. It gives us a chance to go through the show rundown. Then I sync with my producers and directors around 4-4:30 p.m. I go back for hair and make up at 5:30 p.m. We do a pre-tape at seven o’clock and then we go live at 7:30 p.m. The game is at eight o’clock and then I go back to New York.

On what she listens to during her commute: I’m a big podcast girly. It’s dope because working in sports entertainment, you have a lot of friends who do podcasts. I love Queens of the Court by Sheryl Swoopes and Jordan Ligons Robinson, and I love Taylor Rook’s new podcast too. I also love The Read by Crissle and Kid Fury.

On how she relaxes: I love taking dance classes and cirque fitness. So I love Lyra and anti-Gravity yoga at Crunch Fitness. I love taking tumbling, whether that’s adult gymnastics or at a trampoline park. A lot of people don’t know this because I’m six feet tall, but I have a very strong cheer background. I cheered my whole life from Twinkles — what we called it in the nineties — when I was four to when I was 27. If I lose my standing tuck, I lose my life. Tumbling keeps me grounded. Dance classes keep me grounded, and just staying active. I also like long distance running.

On her evening routine: I love competition shows, like Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders: Making The Team back when that was on. I loved that. I loved Top Model. I watch reruns and then I’ll just lay down with my dog. I have another cup of coffee right before bed. I know I drink about a gallon of coffee a day. That’s not healthy, but we do it. I can literally fall asleep while drinking coffee.

On new voices in the WNBA: We can’t say that we want the game to grow and that we want more eyes on it, and then get mad when those eyes come with a differing opinion. A lot of times we feel the need to protect this league, but if we want the equity and equality that we claim to want, we have to let it grow. There’s hella discussion on the men’s sports side about who the GOAT is, about their style of play, things like that. So when it comes to women, let basketball talk happen. People are allowed to feel how they feel. It’s not a personal attack. People are discussing it, and that’s what we wanted. We wanted the game to grow.

On the pushback she’s received in her career:When I started a little over a decade ago, nobody bought into women’s sports. When I walked up to somebody and was like, “I want to do sports broadcasting” — I’m a professional cheerleader at this point — she’s like, “Nobody’s going to take you seriously. You need to write.” So I started off as a writer, being one of the only ones who only wanted to do women’s sports. People just did not care.

I also like to present myself in the most authentic way I can. There have been situations where I’ve been called unpolished. I’ve received pushback for how I wanted to cover women’s sports; I broke a story one time and got blacklisted from player contacting. Women’s sports in themselves are revolutionary and you don’t achieve progress unless you’re rebellious, unless you’re very persistent in that pursuit of change. Change causes a lot of people discomfort. I never married myself to a company or an organization or a platform. I married myself to growing the women’s game. If something doesn’t serve that I will easily walk away, acknowledging that’s a privilege.

On her superpower: My superpower is making people feel seen and celebrated. My broadcasting superpower is not having to change my personality in order to fit a mold. I never felt the need to conform to conventional molds of journalism. When people see my sit-downs with players, it’s more layered, more broken down into its rawest form. I don’t try to package it in a pretty little box. I also don’t try to push narratives.

My favorite job right now is Off Top, my sit-down with the WNBA players. They’ll just tell me who they are, and then we take the conversation wherever they want to take it. I don’t center myself in storytelling when it pertains to athletes. I allow them the space to be themselves.

On one of the most meaningful interviews she’s conducted: In 2020, when everything was going on with police brutality and racial tension, I interviewed Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, who played for the Los Angeles Sparks at the time. Her cousin had gotten murdered at the hands of law enforcement on her draft night. That story was timely, it was necessary, and it really resonated with me. The players had to show up for an America that didn’t necessarily recognize their humanity at the time, which was insane to me.

On perfectionism: I’ve never had a problem with confidence. I know I belong. I work so hard at everything that I do. But when it comes to preparing for a live show in particular, for some reason, I can never look at my performance and say, this is an A plus, and that is my downfall. I was a straight-A student. I played sports that were perfection-based, like cheerleading and gymnastics. So my margin of error is very small, and that’s where I bask in toxicity. We shouldn’t put a timeline on what giving yourself grace is supposed to look like. But I’m actively surrounding myself with people that: one, make me better, two, encourage me, and three, know how to handle me with care but not call on me.

On what makes her proud of the WNBA and it’s biggest challenge going forward: What makes me most proud of the WNBA is they’ve been able to stand as a united front for so long. They’re the longest-standing women’s sports league in the United States, and so they’ve been at the forefront of everything: social causes, racial equity, they flipped the Senate. They’ve been on the right side of history. What I am worried about is how newer eyes on the game are going to digest such a socially progressive league. I hope that they can say, this is a great product, this is a great sport, and attach themselves to whatever players they resonate with and stay for the long run, instead of making this the new novelty or trending thing.