Kate Scott was the first guest on Marc Zumoff’s new Fresh 24 YouTube show and podcast.

It was a good discussion, honest and candid, and the most interesting portion was Scott talking about replacing Zoo as the Sixers play-by-play announcer and dealing with the intense negative reaction that came with it:

Scott:

“Well the good news is that it has dissipated considerably, much quicker than I actually expected… it is not a Philly thing… it’s a society thing. We feel so emboldened these days, to be really mean about our dislike for somebody we don’t know whatsoever. So, pardon my language, but, ya know, ‘hey you cunt faggot bitch, go back to California and be gay on the coast,’ things like that (were said). ‘We don’t want a woman calling sports, what the fuck do you know about men’s basketball with your vagina?’ Things like that. And again, they hurt because I love to interact with people on social media, so in order to be able to interact with people who are kind and want to know about me or want to interact at least in a civil way, I have to read the bad message and tweets in order to interact with the good or interested ones as well. It was really tough for a while.”

Good to hear the Twitter troll stuff has died down a bit. There was some uber-nasty shit said when she took the job.


Scott was always going to have an uphill climb simply for the fact that she was replacing a local legend. Zoo called Sixers games for a long time, and Philly is a parochial town that doesn’t exactly embrace change, so even if Marc’s replacement was a straight white guy, there would have been bitching and moaning and groaning and whatnot, at least for the first year or two. Even now I get emails complaining about Tom McCarthy and Merrill Reese, who have been here forever.

Sports fans always seem to have extra strong opinions about the folks calling the games, so take that and then consider that Kate is a woman, a lesbian, and not from here, and I imagine that all created quite the cocktail of horse shit to deal with.