United States
Kelli Stavast is a veteran American sports broadcaster and journalist. A 2002 graduate of Chapman University, she built her career covering motorsports, the Olympics, and just about every assignment in between. Between 2015 and 2021, she served as a pit reporter for NBC Sports' NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series, as well as the IndyCar Series. The network also sent her to three Olympic Games. She covered diving at the Rio Olympics in 2016 and at the Tokyo Games in 2021, freestyle skiing at the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018. She lives in Las Vegas with her husband, Gavin Ernstone, and chairs a major local fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Pete Weissner was from New York. That detail matters to Kelli Stavast, or at least it explains something. Weissner ran the broadcast journalism program at Chapman University in Orange, California, and the sensibility he carried into that program was shaped by an older version of the profession, one that predated…
When Kelli Stavast looked around broadcast motorsports for someone to model herself after, she didn't find anyone.
Pit road interviews run about 45 seconds. The question was chosen three days earlier. The gap between those two facts is where Kelli Stavast has spent her
Expertise is overrated in broadcast journalism. Not entirely. But the reporter who knows everything about a subject eventually stops needing to ask the people who do, and asking is the actual [...]
"That should have been really ugly, but no one knew." The quote is Kelli Stavast's definition of a good broadcast.
Kelli Stavast and other women in motorsports broadcasting have helped reshape racing media, though barriers still remain in NASCAR, IndyCar, and Formula 1 coverage.
Kelli Stavast did not set out to cover motorsports. She set out to cover football. The job that made her career was a job she walked into knowing almost nothing
The interview no broadcaster wants is the one where the athlete is still crying. The camera is already rolling. The loss is minutes old. The question has to come out of your mouth anyway, and it has to be a question the person in front of you can bear to answer.
Viva St. Jude had a number problem. The Las Vegas fundraising weekend for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital had been running for years, had a loyal volunteer committee, had the [...]