Aba Stars Left Big Impression In Storm’s Eye

When Hannah Storm was growing up, sports put food on the table.

Storm’s real last name is Storen, and her father is Mike Storen, who was once commissioner of the American Basketball Association and president of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.

She remembers a day when she was in the fourth grade when Artis Gilmore and Dan Issel came to the house for a visit.

‘Sports was something for everyone in our family to share and enjoy,” said Storm, who played soccer and softball as a child in Oak Park, Ill.

She competed in track and field in high school, but channeled more of her energy into the arts, especially drama.

“I was sort of a ham,” she says. A career in television sports seems natural given that combination of exposure and interest. But Storm, 32, had to take a hurdle-strewn path to get from there to her current job with NBC and her standing as a rising star in network sports television.

The first step came in 1988, when Storm joined WPCQ-TV (channel 36, now WCNC-TV) as it jumped into local news wars in Charlotte, N.C.

“When I got out of college, I really couldn’t get anyone to hire me to do sports,” said Storm, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1983. “The reason I got was that the stations didn’t want to risk hiring a woman to do sports.”

Storm spent five frustrating years in the Houston area, working as a disc jockey while finding part-time and freelance sports work. Then came the Charlotte job.

“It was the first time I really got a chance to work in television,” Storm said. “I gained so much experience there, and I got to be a lot more comfortable on the air.”

Storm worked with Jim Celania, sports director at channel 36.

“She has tremendous on-air talent, and that’s something you cannot teach, you just have it,” Celania said. “She’s a natural. It’s like an actor or actress - it’s something they’re born with.

“Hannah just loves sports. She knew basketball and she made herself learn the rest. She had that gift, and she also had the intelligence to know what to do with the gift.”

Her stay in Charlotte was brief. CNN officials came calling after seeing an audition tape Storm had sent in from Houston.

By the time she left Charlotte in March of 1989, Storm had already begun to form a philosophy she’s still trying to apply.

“You’re only as good as your last game,” Storm said. “You have to strive every time you go on camera for excellence, and believe that nothing short of that is acceptable.

“I never want to sit back and say, ‘Now that I am at NBC I can coast.’ Everything I do, every time I do it, I want to be better.”

Storm spent three years at CNN, anchoring weeknight and weekend sports news shows and hosting Turner Sports’ coverage of the Goodwill Games. She also met the man she would marry - fellow sportscaster Dan Hicks - and got more experience.

“On some weekends, we were doing five half-hour shows, writing all of our own material,” Storm said. “You were working 12-hour days, working like crazy. By the time I got to NBC, I had so much experience I felt like it helped me jump right in there.”

The network didn’t give her a chance to start any other way. She was hired in May of 1992 and, barely a month later, Storm was at Wimbledon hosting late-night highlights shows. From there, she went straight to Barcelona for the 1992 Summer Olympics, where Storm and Jim Lampley hosted a nightly wrap-up show.

Storm’s pace hasn’t slowed since. She was the network’s lead NFL sideline reporter last season, and serves as a host for Notre Dame football. She has hosted “NBA Showtime” when Bob Costas was doing other things, and will again host the late-night Olympics wrapup show when the Games go to Atlanta in 1996.

“I had a lot of difficulty in getting people to accept me,” she said. “I hope that by doing my best and by showing I have some staying power, I can do my part to change that.

“It is most important for me to try to set a good example, to do my best, to be prepared, to be a professional, to be the kind of person young people can look up to and to do the best job you can every time you step in front of the camera.”