Second-year communications student Taylor Walls was covering a Friday night High School football game for an Eastern Shore radio station when the team’s coach asked her if she knew how to do her job. 

Little did he know Walls is not just an AACC student, but she is a sports broadcaster for 94.3 WINX FM, an Eastern Shore radio station. She landed an internship in 2021 as a sports sideline reporter for Six Pack Coverage, a multimedia company that covers sports, fitness, entertainment, food, travel and finance. 

“And I just look at him and I’m like, ‘you’re just judging me just because I’m a girl,’” Walls, who attended Queen Anne’s County High School noted. “And then I’ll sit there and do my thing. And [he’ll] look at me like [and say] you actually know what you’re talking about.”

Walls added: “My knowledge of the sport [isn’t] determined because of my gender. I know just as much as you do or even more and I’m good at what I do.”

As a sideline reporter, Walls travels around the country to cover college football games and interviews players and coaches. For the local radio station, Walls does play-by-play commentating and quarterly updates for the High School football games on Friday nights. 

Walls said she found both of her jobs through social media.

She said her favorite memory was the “atmosphere of the fans” in the Alabama and Texas A&M game in October 2021.

“It was [a] core memory, you would call it.” Walls said. “It was the most unforgettable game of my life. I was very excited, very nervous, but it was a really good game. … It was a really great experience. I went on the field and I met a few players. I met the defensive coordinator and it was just like an experience you’ll never forget just being on the sidelines in that atmosphere with the fans.”

Before broadcasting she created highlight reels for athletes in 2020. Walls said she was tired of editing films.  

“It brought me into not wanting to edit anymore because it was exhausting,” Walls, who attended Salisbury University in 2021, noted. “And I realized, wait, I can just be the front face of the camera instead of the background.”

Walls added she looks up to Fox Sports reporter Erin Andrews—the lead sideline reporter for NFL Sunday.

“​​I fell in love with her and I DM’d her [and] I was just like, ‘nothing’s going to happen,’” Walls said. ‘This is a celebrity she’s not going to answer. And she actually answered me back and gave me a lot of great advice and I still look up to her to this day. Number one motivation [and] number one person I will always look up to, and I hope one day I’ll be working and she’ll be right there and it’d be so cool.”’

Sports reporting wasn’t Walls’s original career goal. She initially majored in elementary education and one of her teachers asked, “Do you really want to become a teacher because you have the drive, the passion and all that to be successful in this industry?” So she switched to sports journalism.

The Founder and President of Six Pack Coverage Andrew Grayson noted Walls’s “drive” is what makes her stand out.

“That’s probably the best way to put it and she is very eager to go [out] and put in a lot of work for not necessarily a lot of return,” Grayson said.

In fact, Grayson said he would consider hiring her full time.

“I would love to bring her on full time and be one [of the] sports people for that department,” Grayson said. “She does a hell of a job. She likes it [and] she really knows what she’s doing. She’s got the background for it. She definitely stands out among a lot of other people that are interns. She’s top of the list.”

Walls said being a sports broadcaster is one of the hardest jobs.

As “a woman in the sports industry there’s a stereotype and I feel like [those] stereotypes [are] finally starting to change,” Walls noted.