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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\u201cI\nlove sports. I love everything about it,\u201d said Laura Harris, co-anchor of \u201cNBC5\nToday\u201d in the Dallas\/Fort Worth metro area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Originally from Atlanta, Harris and her family moved to\nthe suburbs of the city when she was 7 years old. Living in suburbia, playing soccer was a central\ntenet of her lifestyle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat was my big thing,\u201d said Harris. \u201cWe played soccer all of our lives. So when I got to high school I was getting a little bit better. And they said, \u2018You know what? You might be good enough you could play in college.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harris initially chose Georgia Southern because of soccer and the program in sport management, but also because it wasn\u2019t too far from home. \u201cI knew that if I went too far away from home, Mom and Dad couldn\u2019t see my soccer games,\u201d she said. \u201cThat was one reason I went to Southern. But it was beautiful and it was a big school with kind of like a small town feel. My parents loved that campus. We loved everything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What kept her at Georgia Southern? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think that Georgia Southern really fostered a place for people to be well- rounded. I had the opportunity to do so many different things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The summa cum laude <\/em>graduate was involved in Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, she was the Student-Athlete Association president, in the National Honor Society, on the dean’s list and the president\u2019s list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last semester of her senior year, Harris did an\ninternship with CNN Sports. That experience changed her mind about a plans for\na career in sports management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI realized then, this is what I want to do. I want to be\na sports broadcaster.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After graduating she sent several audition tapes to local television stations. Finally, she got a TV job in Toccoa, Georgia, a small town north of Atlanta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMonday through Friday I was a general assignment reporter for news, because they promised me that there would be some sports opportunity. Then I would drive back to my parents\u2019 house to work at CNN Sports on the weekends.\u201d Later, Harris got a job in Charleston as the morning anchor. Subsequently an opportunity opened\nin Tampa, where Harris could move up to a larger TV market. The only\ndownside, the job was just as a morning reporter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEverybody said I was crazy,\u201d<\/strong> said Harris. \u201cYou\u2019re leaving this job where you’re the main anchor and going to a job where you\u2019ll just be a reporter. But I always knew, there’s more for me there. I gotta go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the place to go, as Harris was promoted twice during her six years in Tampa, where she won an Emmy and two Associated Press awards for breaking news coverage. Then a job as an anchor\/reporter opened in the huge number five TV market of Dallas\/Fort Worth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI am one of the morning anchors here. In the 8 months I\u2019ve been in Dallas, I have already been promoted from weekend anchor to weekday mornings in the fifth largest TV market in the country. It has just truly been an honor to get such an opportunity at such a young age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back on her time at Georgia Southern, Harris\nremembers it as an incredible experience for a student\u2013athlete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGeorgia Southern has captured lightning in a bottle. It doesn’t matter how big it gets, the University will always have this special thing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI’m such a sports fan,\u201d said Leslie Almond, a morning show anchor for WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. \u201cI just fell in love with Georgia Southern when I came for my recruiting trip and we went to a football game.\u201d Almond, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, was recruited to Georgia Southern as a basketball player in 2002. Basketball was the only thing that was important for her until her freshman year got underway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBasketball got me to college, now I had to decide what I\nwanted to do,\u201d said Almond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Almond began working toward a degree in public\nrelations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly before her scheduled graduation in December 2006, she woke up one morning and decided she wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Having previously taken numerous electives in broadcasting, she found she only needed 18 more hours to double major, so she completed an additional semester to graduate in public relations and broadcasting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After\ncompleting her coursework, she interned at KTBS, an ABC affiliate station in\nher hometown of Shreveport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAfter my internship was over, I sat down with the news director and told him, if you want to hire me, I’d love to work here,\u201d said Almond. \u201cAnd he just kind of laughed. There was no opening in sports.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to her internship, then Georgia Southern President Bruce Grube told her he was creating a new position as coordinator of spirit and traditions, and wanted Almond for the role. After the disappointing news from KTBS, she jumped at the chance to work for Georgia Southern. She held the job for a year-and-a-half, coordinating pep rallies and starting events like the Christmas Lighting on Sweetheart Circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was just a really cool job, but deep down I wanted to be in sports broadcasting,\u201d she said. \u201cMy boss let me do sideline reporting once for a Georgia Southern football game. I had never done it before, so I just winged it. It was so much fun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At about the same time, Almond heard from KTBS. They had an opening and wanted her to move back home. She loved her job at Georgia Southern, but made the difficult decision to move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almond moved home as a sports broadcaster for KTBS. For four-and-a-half years, she covered everything in sports. \u201cI mean you name it, we covered it. At that point it was a two-person sports department, so I did everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She realized then she could do it all, from running around and getting her own shots, deciding what highlights to show from the games she covered, what stories to run, then anchoring broadcasts. So Almond began to send out resumes and tapes, and got a job as sports anchor and reporter for the CBS affiliate station in Green Bay, Wisconsin, WFRV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat was just amazing,\u201d she said. \u201cI traveled with the Packers every week. I was live before the game. We had pregame shows and five Packers shows each week. So, pregame, I was live wherever the game was. Then I also started doing national hits for CBS Sports Network. I could have done that job forever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But after three years Almond got the opportunity to come closer to home, to New Orleans. She covered the Saints for two and a half years as a sports anchor\/reporter. August of 2017 an unexpected door opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of the anchors on the morning show was leaving and my news director said, \u2018Hey do me a favor and fill in on the morning show for a week and see if you like it.\u2019 So I did it and I really liked it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almond really loves sports reporting, but moving to the\nmorning show was a better fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy husband, Dustin Almond, and I had our first child, a girl named Avery, last August, so the morning show is a better fit for a new mom. After almost a decade in sports broadcasting I covered a Super Bowl, a BCS National Championship, a Final Four, a College World Series and two Bassmaster Classics. It was time for a new chapter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almond credits her experiences at Georgia Southern with\nhelping pave the way to broadcasting success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her first job at the University introduced her to sideline reporting, and that\u2019s what got it all started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 Liz Walker<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Laura Harris (\u201808), former soccer player, and Leslie Almond (\u201807), former basketball player, were captains at Georgia Southern. Although Harris and Almond played two different sports, they had one big thing in common, they were both sports fanatics. That love of sports led them into sports broadcasting and eventually a seat at a TV news […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":7281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-7278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","tag-spring-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/lauraharris-1-550x508.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\nLESLIE SPOON ALMOND<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nBroadcasting was Calling<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nCovering the Packers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n