ESPN’s Prim Siripipat – Breaking Back and Giving Back

Break back: (verb) 1. In tennis, when a player, having lost a game for which she served, wins the very next game as the receiver of her opponent’s serves. 2. Generally, when a person, following a setback or disappointment, gets back up, tries again, and succeeds: BOUNCE BACK.

Shattered Dreams

Prim Siripipat remembers the date with great clarity. “March 17, 2010, St. Patty’s Day,” she recalls. “It was a Wednesday.” After two-and-a-half years living her hard-earned dream as a sports reporter and weekend anchor for CBS’s Miami affiliate, she was suddenly out of a job, cut by her bosses, her dream shattered.

The stunning development triggered a harshly difficult season in her life. “It was definitely one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to deal with,” she reflects. The turn of events caused her to question her abilities as a sportscaster, and more: “It was a time when I was losing confidence in myself as a person,” she says.

Her intense feelings reflected just how much proverbial – and literal – blood, toil, tears, and sweat she had expended just to get to that point in her career. She’d once been a rising young tennis phenom training beside stars Martina Hingis and Jennifer Capriati. But chronic injuries, and multiple surgeries while playing for Duke University, hastened the end of her original dream, a pro career after college. Then came the five-year, exhausting and seemingly endless grind of small market TV work in North Carolina. A one-woman band in those days, she was responsible for producing, shooting, reporting, and editing her own stories on ultra-tight deadlines, covering everything from four-hour college football games to a fatal car accident. After all that struggle, and apparent success in Miami, she had run into a wall of professional rejection.

But almost one year to the day that she was dropped by the station, she strode into the Bristol, Connecticut headquarters of ESPN, the world’s largest sports network, as its newest reporter and anchor. “And ESPN was the place I had always wanted to go to!” she affirms.

Talking with Prim these days, one gets a clear sense that this was no mere stroke of luck. Her gutsy stick-to-itiveness and resourcefulness played huge parts in overcoming the seeming death of her sportscasting dream. Chatting with her recently over Google Voice, I asked how that inner strength and character was forged over the years. Our conversation took us back to a small city smack dab in the middle of the United States, a world away from both her parents’ native Thailand as well as the television cameras of the Worldwide Leader in Sports (as ESPN calls itself).

The town: Mexico, Missouri. Population: 12,000.

Little Girl from Mexico

Prim’s father and mother, Pallop and Ampai, were newlyweds when they arrived in the United States from Thailand at the ripe young age of 25. After her father earned his M.D. from the University of Oklahoma’s medical school, and her mother earned her Ph.D. from the university’s College of Education, the couple moved to St. Louis. It was there that her father did his OB/GYN residency. He later opened his own medical practice in the small town of Mexico, two hours away, after driving there and seeing that the city had no OB/GYN specialist.

“I knew that I was different.” Prim recalls of her early years in the mostly White, mostly Catholic community. “I was probably one of two Asian kids in our entire town – one of three if you include my brother!” (That’s Nick, who’s five years her senior.) She adds, “As a kid, I felt for the most part that I fit in. But of course there were days, where if you are different from other kids, you do feel like an outsider. Asian culture has different priorities. And sometimes I wished I had blond hair, blue eyes, and freckles.”

The cultural differences began at home, as her parents tried to inculcate traditional Thai values. She explains, “Compared to other Asian parents, they were probably quite liberal. But they were still very strict on certain things, such as academics, which were massively important in my household.” Thai values also meant Prim got involved in a large variety of activities. She recounts what, amazingly, is only a partial list: “I started piano when I was four, then saxophone and clarinet by the time I was 10. I did gymnastics, hip-hop, tap, ballet, swimming, tennis, basketball, and student council.” She laughs, “I was really doing everything!

Her parents also insisted on traditional Asian manners. She recalls, “If I went over to a friend’s house, they would always ask that I call my friend’s parents ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ In American culture, you can call your friend’s parents by their first name, but I would always call them ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’” Even body positioning could reflect manners and respect. She explains, “In Thailand, because the feet are the lowest part of the body, you would never put your feet in somebody else’s face. You’d move your feet away as a sign of respect. It was really just being very respectful to everybody.”

But as is common for Asian American children and their immigrant parents, culture became a significant point of tension in the Siripipat household. “It was hard for me as a kid to understand why my friends could do things, and I couldn’t,” she remembers. “The Mr. and Mrs., the curfews, what’s appropriate when going to a dance – like what I could wear, what I couldn’t, whether I could dance with a boy – which early on, I wasn’t allowed to. There were a lot of clashes.”

Despite the cultural conflicts within the family, Prim’s parents still went to great lengths to help her develop her abilities. “I excelled at tennis pretty quickly,” she says. “By the time I was nine, I beat my first coach 6-0, 6-0. By the time I was 10, I was beating all the high school girls by 6-0, 6-0 or 6-1, 6-1.” Her parents recognized their daughter’s prodigious talent. To help take her skills to the next level, Prim and her mother began a daily two-hour round trip drive to Columbia, Missouri, to train with one particular coach. She continues, “When I was a sixth grader, I would be in school for seven or eight hours a day. Then my mom would immediately pick me up after school; we would drive for an hour; I would train for three or four hours; we’d drive back an hour; I would do my homework and practice the saxophone in the back of the car; and we’d get home at 11. It was really tough. Looking back, my parents did such a good job working as a team to give their kid a good opportunity.”

Go East, Young Woman

The routine took so much of a toll on the family physically and emotionally that Prim’s parents made a drastic decision when she was 12: her father would stay in the town of Mexico with her brother, a graduating senior, and her mother would move with her to Tampa, Florida. There, Prim would attend the famed Saddlebrook Tennis Academy until she finished high school. It gave her the chance to train with elite coaches and athletes like Hingis, Capriati, Andy Roddick, and Mardy Fish. But the tense cultural divide between her and her parents become a huge chasm.

“It wasn’t exactly World War III,” she remembers, laughing. “But Tampa was completely different and exacerbated the cultural issues. It had Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and Asians. There was gang activity and drugs all over, a ton of nightclubs, rich and poor people. There were a lot of positive influences, but a lot of negative ones, too. It was a major change.”

She continues, “At the time, it felt as if my parents didn’t have a good understanding of American teenagers, like why kids are hanging out late at night, or why girls are more worried about friends, boys, clothes, and looking pretty. And also about dating – like when it starts, how it starts, what’s acceptable. In retrospect, I’m so thankful for the way my parents handled it. But at the time, as a teenager you don’t have a sense of the bigger picture; you don’t understand why your parents are doing things. The only thing you can understand is that they don’t understand you!”

Prim’s relationship with her parents began to improve late in high school. She says, “It was probably not until I was 17 or 18 that I finally realized what my parents’ intentions were. My parents were very smart with certain things. They did their job keeping me on track.” A deep gratitude for her parents’ efforts to support her also took root. “What a crazy sacrifice for my parents to separate physically for seven years, flying back and forth so I could pursue tennis,” she continues. “I don’t remind myself enough to this day what an amazing sacrifice my parents made.”

Being part of a world-renowned tennis academy also helped to bridge the gap between parents and daughter. “You had people from Japan, China, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Guam – from everywhere,” she recounts. “Seeing how they embraced their cultures really encouraged me to hone in on my culture and my past.”

The relationship with her parents matured even further in her mid-twenties. “I made a big effort, whether they liked it or not, to be honest with them about what I was doing and about my past,” she reveals. “I think that full honesty and disclosure gives you a really true, authentic relationship. So they knew exactly who I was. And even if we didn’t agree on something, we could at least come to an understanding of why we did things the way we did.”

It becomes clear, as Prim talks about her parents now, that her stick-to-itiveness and resourcefulness owe a lot to her parents. She declares, “Regardless of what has happened, my parents have been my greatest teachers. They’ve helped me every single step of the way. They were very strict but also very supportive and realistic and smart, able to provide me advice and give me a better sense of the greater picture. Now, my parents and I have an amazing, open relationship; we’re closer than ever.”

Sources of Strength

Prim’s inner strength and resolve, which would especially become her lifeline after leaving CBS Miami, found its source not only in the people who had loved her the most – her parents – but also in the game that she loved the most, tennis. “Sports expedites the learning process,” she maintains. “I think that I, and some of the people I’ve trained with, learned some of the greatest lessons of life by the time we were 20 years old. I’m looking at some people in their thirties who still haven’t learned those lessons – time management, discipline, setting and achieving goals, handling failure and mistakes, being a team player. My parents, and tennis, really helped me to deal with challenges and obstacles, to get back on my feet and keep going.”

Dealing with an increasing number of tennis injuries was part of that fortitude-building process. “I had dealt with a number of injuries – sprained my ankle several times, had tendinitis in my wrist and elbow,” she recalls. “Then by the time I was 17, I had two stress fractures in my back from merely overtraining. By the time I was a junior at Duke, I had to have surgery – arthroscopic on my shoulder, my right knee the next month, and my left knee the month after.”

It became clear that her dream of playing professional tennis would never come to fruition. “I was really upset,” Prim remembers. Not only did her parents encourage her through that time, but friends and mentors did, too, acting as yet another source of her strength. She adds, “My parents have been my biggest supporters, but there have also been a lot of other people along the way.”

One mentor that especially touched her life was longtime ESPN sportscaster Linda Cohn, one of the first women to anchor the network’s signature program, SportsCenter. It’s a story Prim especially enjoys recounting: “When I went through those surgeries and wasn’t playing any tennis, a professor of mine suggested that I look into getting into TV. I knew if I couldn’t play sports, I wanted to be around it, to cover it, to be around athletes. I thought of ESPN, so I flew myself up to Bristol because I was recovering from surgery and didn’t have anything else to do. So while everybody else was drinking and partying on Spring Break, I was sitting in 20-degree Bristol, Connecticut in a Clarion Hotel! A former Duke alum at ESPN, Craig Lazarus, really helped me, and said I could shadow him. He also hooked me up with Linda Cohn, and I shadowed her and a number of people at ESPN for a day.”

Linda gave Prim some advice that would become her roadmap for the years that followed. Prim remembers, “She said, ‘If you want to be on air, don’t come here; it’s too big of a company. Start in a small market like I did. Get your mistakes and experience out there, and then come join us.’ So that’s what I did. That moment was in March 2002. Almost to the day, nine years later, I was at ESPN.”

Prim had the chance to thank Linda in person several months into her job with ESPN. She says, “It was pretty cool, I was sitting next to Linda in the makeup room. It was so surreal sitting next to this awesome sportscaster that had given me all that advice and had really paved the way for people like me, females in sports. She looked over at me and asked, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ I said, ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I shadowed you nine years ago. You told me to do this and that, don’t come here and go to a small market, and here I am.’ Linda said, ‘That’s so cool, welcome!’”

Other mentors for Prim included Tom Suiter, a veteran sportscaster of over 40 years in the Raleigh-Durham media market. It was in Raleigh where Prim reported (and produced, shot, and edited) any story that the station needed someone to cover. Of Tom, she says, “He’s been a big supporter and also a second father figure.” Later, when she worked in Miami, one of the station’s main anchors, Antonio Mora, also reached out and gave Prim a lot of support. “He’s now an anchor with Al Jazeera America in New York City,” she adds.

As St. Patrick’s Day of 2010 approached, along with the layoff notice that would blindside her that day, Prim had become stronger than she herself realized. Her parents, the sport of tennis, and her friends and mentors had all been key sources of her growth into an extraordinary, determined young woman. But the news that she was being forced out would still be devastating.

How could it not be?

Breaking Back

For two-and-a-half years, Prim thrived as a reporter and weekend anchor for WFOR Channel 4 in the Miami market. She covered pro football’s Miami Dolphins, college football’s University of Miami Hurricanes, ice hockey’s Florida Panthers, baseball’s Florida (now-Miami) Marlins, and basketball’s Miami Heat. One of her pieces especially shows the energy and joy she derived from the job; here, she auditions to become a Miami Heat dancer:

It’s no wonder that getting dropped by the station was a major blow to her confidence. She had experienced not only the death of her first dream, of playing pro tennis, but also her second, of being a sportscaster. But the fortitude and character that had formed in her soul through the years helped her to get back up and begin yet again.

“Ironically, I found myself modeling and doing some acting,” she explains. “I also got back into coaching tennis. That was awesome because it forced me to be a leader, to coach these kids, to be a mentor, to go out and train with them in 100-degree weather. That was a really cool experience, having a job where I could actually make an impact on somebody else’s life.

“The layoff ended up being one of the best things for me,” she continues. “The station I worked with went through a lot of changes and financial trouble. And the layoff exposed me to different things that in the back of my head, I kind of wanted to do, but never knew I could. It gave me a lot of confidence to know I could survive something like that, and if anything so difficult happened again, I would be fine.”

Nearly a year after WFOR dropped her, and after two rounds of interviews, Prim joined ESPN. Her dream had revived.

She had broken back.

Giving Back

These days, Prim covers just about every sport imaginable on every ESPN platform – television, radio, and Internet – and frequently, she anchors pro football and tennis coverage. Even as she recognizes that she has accomplished much, she understands the role that other people have played in her journey, and that she can do the same for others. She explains, “To have Linda Cohn as a role model was really crucial. I owe her a big thanks. It’s amazing what a little help for somebody else can do. Now I get former athletes or Dukies calling me for advice. I always try my best to take the time to pay it forward; maybe just a phone call will help somebody out. I know how much it meant to me when I was getting into this business. Certainly, I wouldn’t be where I am today without the help of other people.”

She enjoys connecting with groups, too. She continues, “One of my favorite things to do is speak to a journalism class or young student athletes, especially females. I want to just offer some sort of advice or perspective on how they can follow their dream, or give them some inspiration for when they get down and feel like they can’t do it. I want to let them know that obstacles will always come, but they can absolutely do it, because I did it. If I did it, a little girl from Mexico, Missouri, there’s no doubt they can do it, too.”

She also sees her opportunity, given her platform as an ESPN sportscaster, to lend her voice toward social change. “I’m in an egotistical and narcissistic field because you’re on camera,” she observes. “What good would I be if I had this big stage and didn’t use it for a good cause?”

Her outlook and platform led to an invitation earlier this year to Arianna Huffington’s New York City condominium. She joined other notable communicators and influencers like Sen. Clare McCaskill from Prim’s home state of Missouri, trailblazing journalists Barbara Walters and Katie Couric, Obama Administration adviser Valerie Jarrett, and Google Vice President Megan Smith. The gathering launched Ms. Huffington’s endeavor Third Metric, which aims to change how Western society measures success – “beyond money and power,” in the words of HuffingtonPost.com.

“My ultimate goal,” she says, “would be to continue what Arianna Huffington has done in redefining success, especially for women. In the 21st century, for women and young girls, it is more difficult because you still have the traditional expectations – being nurturing, getting married, raising a family – but now also the expectation and power to pursue a career and make as much money as a man – or more. Now there’s double responsibilities. It becomes very tough for a woman.

“Then with social media, advertisements, and marketing,” she adds, “there’s horrible and unrealistic expectations for young girls in terms of beauty and being too skinny. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And I hate that. Those are things I struggled with when I was younger. And being a perfectionist and a woman in her early thirties, I still struggle with it. I hate the fact that our next generation of girls is being exposed to that by the time they’re seven years old. It’s ridiculous. My journey is about trying to ease the pressure on girls.”

Waking Again

Even though she’s working her dream job, like everyone else, Prim’s life has its ups and downs. She reflects on a period this past Spring when she was running herself ragged: “My priorities were out of whack. I was focusing on my career so much and where I was going, or where I wasn’t going, and who was doing what, and I was working endlessly and tiring myself out.”

Then came the Boston Marathon.

“I happened to be there,” she recalls. “I was watching my best friend run.”

And, two blocks away, the bombs exploded.

“Everybody went from celebration and laughing to horror and fear,” she recounts. “You could hear the ambulances. Helicopters were everywhere. Transportation was shut down. I went, like a lot of people, through fear, confusion, anger, regret, guilt that you walked away without a scratch on you. It really put things in perspective about what is really important in life.

“For lack of a better term, life is obviously so precious,” she continues. “Sometimes you don’t realize you take everything for granted, especially as you become an adult. That was a wake-up call. You would hate to think it takes such a negative event to open somebody’s eyes to what’s really important. But sometimes you can only learn a big lesson through a dramatic experience.”

Whether she runs in next year’s Boston Marathon or not – a decision she is still considering, given her previous knee surgeries – she fully intends to be present. “I’ll be there,” she declares, “no matter what.” No doubt she will be there not only to cheer on the runners and support the Boston community, but also because she wants to stay attuned to healthy priorities and values. As she says, “I always try to keep that day in mind when I think about what is really important in life.”

There’s a lot that the next generation of girls and young women can learn from Prim Siripipat. She’s a special young woman, full of strength and possessing wisdom uncommon in people her age. This article’s author, as a father to two young daughters, is quite glad that Prim feels so passionately about impacting the next generation, giving back even as others have given of themselves to her. After all, her work will benefit his daughters and their peers.

“I don’t consider myself an inspiration,” she says.

She may not, but many do. And it’s a safe bet that many more will, too.

Follow Prim on Twitter via @ESPNPrim and article author Eugene Hung via @iaurmelloneug.