Alum Monica McNutt (C’11) Shares Lessons in Resilience on Her Rise to ESPN

When Monica McNutt (C’11) moved to West Palm Beach, Florida in 2015 to work for the newly launched American Sports Network as a sports reporter, anchor and analyst, she figured she would be leaving DC behind her. 

But less than two years later, the network laid her off. It was her second layoff in three years. She moved back in with her parents in the DC area with her “tail between [her] legs,” McNutt said. She was uncertain where she stood in the sports journalism and media industry and frustrated by the lack of steady employment. 

“I was embarrassed, because as much as you are told a layoff is not personal … what you do as a journalist, particularly on television, is so closely attached to who you are,” she said. “It’s hard to separate the two.”

“I wanted to be working so bad, and I can remember having little fits punching pillows,” McNutt continued. She saw other journalists on air and thought, “I can do that too. Why is this happening to me? Like, what is going on?”

That volatile period would eventually lead McNutt to where she is now. McNutt is an NBA, WNBA and college basketball analyst for ESPN and an analyst covering the New York Knicks for MSG Networks. Sports fans can find her analysis and expertise on various television and radio programs and podcasts. The time McNutt spent bouncing between jobs ultimately gave her a more well-rounded perspective on her life. She had time to go to lunch with her parents and the former Hoyas women’s basketball star even joined a recreational basketball league with former teammates. 

“I just look back on that year, and I often think about how God was able to use it to remind me of when I feel most loved, and how important it is to carve out time to make sure that that is still a part of my life,” McNutt said. “The only thing truly inevitable in our lives is change.”

A Hoya from the Start

From a young age, McNutt was “entrenched” in Georgetown basketball, she said. McNutt played basketball while growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland and became a standout player at the Academy of the Holy Cross. 

Her dad is a “huge” Georgetown fan, she said, and McNutt has fond memories of going to Georgetown basketball games as a kid. One time, she was a ball girl for Georgetown when the Syracuse University men’s basketball team was in town, and she was able to see future NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony, a player that she and her father had followed and studied, up close.

When Georgetown recruited her to play basketball, it felt “serendipitous,” she said. 

At a recruiting visit to Georgetown when McNutt was in high school, she remembers meeting the late Coach John Thompson Jr., or “Big John.”

“Having a chance to sit down and chat with Big John … and knowing all that he had meant at this point — to basketball, to the Black community, to Georgetown, to my dad — it was really surreal,” she said. Meeting Thompson and her future teammates and coaches led her to choose Georgetown, which McNutt considers to be “one of the best [decisions] I’ve made over the course of my life.” 

During her senior season, McNutt led the Hoyas to the Sweet 16 of the 2011 NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament. She scored a team-high 17 points in a close loss to the University of Connecticut. McNutt still looks back fondly on the practices with her teammates, “folks that I still share a group chat with today,” and camaraderie in the locker room, she said.

McNutt was captain of the team for two years and a leader both on and off the court for the Hoyas.

Barbara Barnes, the associate athletics director for communications at Georgetown, said she quickly realized that McNutt was the perfect spokesperson for the team. “She really knew how to captivate an audience and how to get her point across,” Barnes said. 

After her final game for the Hoyas, McNutt introduced herself to the reporters assembled in front of her. She told them she was now looking for a career in broadcasting. As her athletic career came to an end, McNutt looked to the future. “I wanted to be able to host, to report, to tell stories,” she said.

Finding ‘Resilient Stories’

After graduating, McNutt worked as a kindergarten aide for a year and then enrolled in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland for her master’s degree.

While she got experience in different types of journalism through the program, McNutt knew she wanted to stay in sports journalism. “I felt that the experience [in sports] for me had been so powerful, and there were so many great stories,” she said. “I want to stay with the joy of sport, the triumphant nature, the resilient stories.”

As women’s basketball continues to grow and rise in popularity, McNutt wants to tell stories that celebrate women and ensure fair coverage of the Black women who were pioneers of the sport. “I am protective of a space that has worked so hard for every bit of attention and dollar and sponsorship that it has right now. Everybody that helped get here should be respected,” she said.

Her time as a Division I athlete and an English major at Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences helped prepare her for a career in broadcast journalism. She realized she wanted to be a journalist after taking Professor Barbara Feinman Todd’s Media and Techniques class, and her love for the field grew from taking another class taught by Athelia Night, a former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

“Georgetown is the foundation of my career,” McNutt said in a 2024 interview. “It’s a place that helped me find my voice and develop the basketball eye that would be critical to the career I continue to build. My time on the women’s basketball team, particularly the two years that I was a team captain, helped me develop self-awareness which has benefited me tremendously personally and in the workplace. At the root of media is the ability to communicate, which requires understanding your audience.”

“I remember a number of classes and discussions on the Hilltop centered on community and understanding,” she added. “While I am in front of the mic professionally, I still value community and understanding and want to remain respectful of the people that I’m privileged to cover.”

McNutt started her broadcasting career at Prince George’s Community Television, and then worked at WJLA NewsChannel 8. But when Sinclair took over the station, she lost her job. Sinclair then brought McNutt to Florida to work on its new sports network, American Sports Network. After just over two years, the network shut down.

Moving back home, McNutt spent the next year and a half “hustling and grinding,” she said, and navigating the freelance world while working for ESPN, CBS, FOX Sports and local television. That experience, she said, was “really instrumental in my life at large” and required steadying herself “through faith and community.”

When ESPN launched the ACC Network in 2019, the network hired McNutt. This year marks her seventh year with ESPN. 

“All the credit goes to Monica, because the thing I’ll say about her is, at the beginning, she was willing to [cover] anything, no matter the sport, no matter how low level it was,” Barnes said. “She was willing to go out there and do it, and I think that is why she’s been so successful.”

Staying True to Yourself

Graduating from Georgetown in 2011, McNutt remembers people in her class were scared to start their careers in a rocky job market. One key to success then and now, McNutt said, is the ability to combine creativity and “outside-of-the-box” thinking with practical skills.

“If you can solve a problem, you have a skill that is desirable,” she said.

McNutt encourages those entering the sports media industry to be authentic. 

“My advice in general to young people getting into space is to take yourself with you wherever you go,” she said. “Just be mindful of how you’re showing up wherever you are, especially in an era of social media, because employers potentially look up your LinkedIn and also your Instagram.”

McNutt also advocates for having “a healthy relationship with ‘no.’” 

“I totally understand the importance of being able to support oneself financially,” McNutt said. “But I also have the lived experience that it is not a personal relationship with these jobs, and so you got to be able to hear ‘no’ without it decimating your hopes and dreams, and to use no in order to protect your hopes and dreams as you figure it out.”

While she did not take a straight line to get to where she is today, McNutt said she has few regrets. Each experience has been a learning opportunity, helping her become a more well-rounded and healthy person. Because of the winding path, she has been able to build both a life and a career.

“If I hadn’t been laid off, I don’t know if my compass for my life would be so deliberate about carving out time for my loved ones and my family,” she said. “I think all things work out. They work together. So there’s not much that I would have changed. I think even in our missteps, there’s such beautiful lessons, and I think that’s important to our journeys.”

(Top image courtesy of Georgetown University Athletics)