Doris Burke

“We still have a long way to go. Because the reality is that I'm 52-years-old. And how many 55 to 60-year-old women do you see in sports broadcasting? How many? I see a lot of 60-year-old men broadcasting. The physical appearance and natural aging of all the men doing this job don't matter.”

“What makes great rivalries is when individual or team matchups occur, something's got to be on the line, and usually that's a championship.”

“If the NBA teaches us anything, you have to have talent to win.”

“Now that my responsibilities are exclusively NBA, I watch two NBA games a night, usually fall asleep in the third quarter of the west coast game.”

“The one thing I would say is, I do think women are evaluated differently than men. How we look, what is our age? Do you see a ton of 55-year-old women in sports television? No. But there are men in their 60s and 70s across many networks who are still in sports television.”

“My strength is that I know the game so well. Whatever shortcomings I had because of lack of experience, I could always overcome those because the bottom line was, I knew the game.”

“I'm not naive to the fact that my gender has at times helped me. Employers are now thinking, 'Let's get perspectives that are different than the ones we have.'”

“The players and the coaches have been my soft landing spot, and those men and their acceptance of me and the respect they've shown to me on the air, that has changed fans' opinion of me.”

“My whole push was I wanted to do all basketball.”

“Going back as far as I do covering men's college basketball, the objections to me being an analyst never came from inside the game. The players and coaches have always showed me the utmost respect and quite frankly my gender has never felt like an issue inside the game.”

“For men's college coaches through to the NBA, I think basketball people are basketball people. When you start talking the game, gender has gone out the window, and they just talk basketball with you.”

“Providence College was the perfect place for me. It changed my life.”

“I had no background in communications but what I did have was an excellent education from Providence College and a love of basketball. That afforded me the chance to be good on my feet and stay afloat while I learned the media business.”

“I've been the beneficiary of very good timing and some forward-thinking bosses who were willing to put women in places they hadn't yet been.”

“And I loved every single second of being an assistant coach. I loved it.”

“The reason I'm fiendishly drawing end-of-game plays when I'm taking notes is what if I screwed up something down the stretch of a game?”

“It's always been helpful in my experience to just converse with the person in front of me.”

“People have asked me, 'Do you consider yourself a trailblazer?' Absolutely not. And the reason I say this is, I am aware of the women who came before me.”

“I was scared to death to speak in public.”

“For me to even think about attending a college or university would have been a real financial hardship. It would not have happened. That basketball scholarship changed my life.”