The Utah Jazz have added new prospects.
The same goes for their television broadcast.
Smith Entertainment Group announced Wednesday that it has hired Lauren Green, 25, as its new field reporter. Green will travel with the team for all 82 games this regular season, covering Jazz events during the team’s televised broadcasts on KJZZ and Jazz+.
Also announced on Wednesday was a role change for Holly Rowe, who has spent the last three seasons as the team’s commentator alongside Craig Bolerjack and Thurl Bailey. Rowe will no longer be in the team’s commentary booth, but will instead work as a storyteller on select content throughout the season across various mediums, such as her Front Rowe PodcastShe will also appear in segments of the telecast. A recipient of the Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Media Award, Rowe will focus on her duties at ESPN, where she is the lead reporter for college football and the WNBA.
Introducing Field Reporter Lauren Green
Green had two great passions in his life: athletics and journalism.
In both cases, seconds count.
As an athlete, she was one of the fastest young runners in the West. She first competed in high school in New Mexico, where she says she was “state champion countless times.” She ran the 100 meters in 12.56 seconds in one meet, the 200 meters in 25.16 seconds in another, and the 400 meters in 55.51 seconds in yet another.
She ran track at the University of Nevada, chosen, she says, because of the school’s diverse journalism program, which included television, print, podcasting, documentary filmmaking and more. But she found her initial calling in broadcasting sports news to a broader audience.
“Track and field has been my life for a very long time, and live television is kind of the closest thing that allows me to feel the same joy and intensity that I get when I’m running a race,” Green said. “There’s a fun, performative aspect that I love about being on camera.”
Green diversified her portfolio at Arizona State’s Cronkite School of Journalism, where she earned a master’s degree while covering ASU basketball and track and field. While at the school, she covered the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, Steph Curry’s golf tournament, and more.
A chance meeting at the National Association of Black Journalists conference led to Green being hired as a weekend news anchor at New Mexico’s NBC affiliate, KOB4, where she has worked for two years.
It was a highly competitive position, said Travis Henderson, the Jazz’s senior vice president of broadcasting, with “hundreds” of applicants for the job that involves months of travel with a professional sports team.
But Green stood out from the crowd.
“In her news segment in Albuquerque, she was a one-woman operation covering all the sports events on a daily basis,” Henderson said. “She was really brave in that sense, she did a lot of things herself, a lot of her own reporting, her own writing, she did everything herself.”
Without a traditional sideline reporter since Kristen Kenney’s departure, the team has relied on Bolerjack and Nayo Campbell to do locker room interviews, roles outside their job descriptions.
Henderson said Green would enhance the Jazz broadcast by providing more “details on some of the bigger stories that we’ve always covered — adding some context and some coverage to things that maybe we couldn’t always go into, just because that’s not what we do.”
Green will also contribute significantly to the pregame, halftime and postgame shows on KJZZ and Jazz+, including hosting select broadcasts.
It’s a big job, but one Green woman said she’s ready to do it.
“I’m going to be at every public practice, every press conference. I’m always going to be there to see and observe everything that’s going on with the Jazz and to go to every away game,” she said. “I have to bring to this position a very specific narrative for what the public just can’t see. How do I present that in a way that’s personal, but also trustworthy and digestible for anyone watching? That’s my goal.”
