Sports Broadcaster Anish Shroff ’04 Hopes to Inspire Future Generations of South Asian Sportscasters

Anish Shroff ’04 happens to be the only minority radio play-by-play voice of a National Football League (NFL) team. It’s not something the veteran sportscaster embraces, but it’s a trend that seems to be shifting.

Eternally proud of his South Asian heritage, Shroff readily admits a sense of pride when he looks around the sportscasting landscape and sees a plethora of talented South Asian broadcasters working for ESPN, MLB Network, Fox Sports, TNT and other national media outlets.

It’s a change that has been a long time coming. Growing up, Shroff remembers watching his beloved New York Yankees and other professional sports games on television … and not seeing anyone who looked like him calling the games. That’s because the industry was dominated by white men.

Shroff’s parents immigrated to the United States from India as first-generation Americans. His parents—Hitesh and Nikita—arrived in New York City in 1972, at the time George Steinbrenner’s Yankees were embarking on a great run of success in the 1970s.

Hitesh came to America to earn a college degree in accounting, but he never worked a day in his life as an accountant. Rather, his passion was photography, and he carved out a 40-year career as a successful photographer before retiring.

Pursuing passions was something Nikita and Hitesh emphasized to their baseball-crazy son. By the time Anish was in the fifth grade he was an avid baseball player, a rabid collector of sports trading cards and read the Newark Star-Ledger sports section cover-to-cover.

When it came time to decide on a career, Anish opted to study broadcast journalism in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. A talented student broadcaster for WAER-FM, Shroff found himself calling Orange games on one of the country’s most prestigious radio stations.

The hard work and dedication Shroff put into his craft paid off, as today, he is entering his second season calling Carolina Panthers games on the team’s network of radio stations. Shroff has also handled play-by-play duties for ESPN’s coverage of college football, college basketball, men’s lacrosse and baseball.

For all his success, Shroff credits his parents for encouraging him to go after his dreams. But before more South Asians can follow his path, Shroff says a change is needed in how that community views the industry and aspiring sportscasters who want to make a living as a broadcaster.

“The one part of this story of which we need to take ownership is that sportscasting is not a profession that is looked upon favorably in the South Asian community. You’re not going to be a doctor? You’re not going to be an engineer? You’re not getting your master’s degree in business administration? You don’t want to go to graduate school? What are you doing? He wants to go and do what, communications? That’s just not what we do,” Shroff says of how the South Asian community has traditionally viewed the fields of sportscasting and broadcast journalism.

“A lot of South Asians who may have wanted to pursue this path don’t get the one thing that they need—encouragement. I never felt the pressure that I had to go be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or go get an MBA or do one of those things that are traditionally associated with the South Asian subculture. From that standpoint, we’ve got to take ownership and encourage our kids to do what they want. I was lucky,” says Shroff.

Check out episode 147 of the “’Cuse Conversations” podcast featuring Shroff.  A transcript [PDF] is also available.