5-year-old Holly Rowe’s love of BYU football launched an ESPN career. It comes full circle in BYU vs. Notre Dame

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All eyes will be on LaVell Edwards Stadium on Saturday night for the clash between No. 8 BYU and No. 2 Notre Dame, but it’s more than another primetime matchup for Holly Rowe, ESPN’s sideline reporter for the game. It’s a full-circle moment.

On Saturday, Rowe will return to the sidelines of LaVell Edwards Stadium, where her career and love of football began, for the first time since 2003. The assignment has left Rowe “feeling really nostalgic,” she told the Deseret News this week.

“My lifelong love affair with college football really started in this stadium,” she said. “Now I get to go back, and it’s named after LaVell Edwards, who is someone who meant a lot to me and was just instrumental in my career.”

Holly Rowe’s football journey began as a BYU fan

Rowe’s journalism career began at BYU, where she studied for two years and was a news anchor for KBYU-TV before transferring to the University of Utah. After graduating, she was the BYU football sideline reporter for the Blue and White Sports Network from 1993-97.

She first caught ESPN’s attention in 1995 when she noticed ABC didn’t have a sideline reporter for the BYU-Utah game. She called the producer and volunteered for the job.

After that game, she asked where the next broadcast would be. When she found out it was in San Jose, California, she lied and said she coincidentally already had plans to be in the area. The producer offered her the gig, and Rowe figured out a way to San Jose from Salt Lake City.

ESPN hired her full time the following season. But before Rowe’s career took off, she was a little girl falling in love with BYU football.

Rowe remembers sitting in the stands at Cougar Stadium when she was just 5 years old to watch BYU face Hawaii. She can still picture Hawaii’s rainbow helmets and uniforms.

“I was just so intrigued,” she said. “They were so exotic to this little kid, and they were huge. And BYU and Hawaii went on to have a really good rivalry through the years, and so I just got obsessed.”

Rowe loved BYU football so much that she collected local newspaper clippings about the program, including from the 1980 Holiday Bowl victory. She rediscovered them while cleaning out her garage during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Growing up, former BYU running back Vai Sikahema became one of Rowe’s “very, very favorite all-time BYU players,” but she also gained a great appreciation for BYU’s quarterback legacy.

“I’ve been blessed to watch some of the best offense and quarterbacks for my whole life,” she said. “My first quarterback I was obsessed with was Gary Scheide. … We had Gifford Nielsen and Marc Wilson and Jim McMahon, Steve Young. That’s just such an incredible list.”

“If LaVell and Ron McBride had not have been so generous and kind and welcoming to me, I wouldn’t be here.”

Holly Rowe

In 1990, as a fan, Rowe rushed the field with her sisters when unranked BYU upset defending national champion and No. 1 Miami. Rowe and her sisters will be on that same field again together on Saturday as her sisters hold her monitor during the game.

“We have grown up as football-loving little girls in our household, and we’re still football fans,” Rowe said.

It’s the first time her sisters have been on the sideline with her since 2014 when the Marcus Mariota-led Oregon Ducks came to town to play Utah.

“It’s been a long time since we got to do this together, so we’re so excited,” she said. “The whole family’s just so excited.”

LaVell Edwards’ impact

In her time covering BYU football, Rowe had the opportunity to get to know BYU’s legendary head coach LaVell Edwards, first as a coach, then as a person.

“From afar, you would be scared of LaVell,” Rowe said. “He had, you know, resting coach face, and there was a certain persona he had on the sideline. But when you got to know him, he was absolutely delightful.”

One of Rowe’s favorite memories was when she did a profile of Edwards for KBYU-TV — in his garden.

“What people didn’t know about LaVell is he was an avid gardener,” she said. “That’s how he relieved all of his stress, and he had this elaborate, incredible garden and flowers and everything at his house.

“So we sat in his garden and did an interview, and we got to laughing so hard we couldn’t do the interview. The camera guy was yelling at us because he and I were laughing our guts out.”

Rowe said she is grateful for the kindness Edwards and former Utah head coach Ron McBride showed her. At the mention of the two men, Rowe became emotional.

“I was one of the first women doing this job, and there weren’t a lot of women that were beat reporters or coming around football,” she said. “If LaVell and Ron McBride had not been so generous and kind and welcoming to me, I wouldn’t be here. So I’m just grateful to those guys.”

Rowe said working as a woman in sports media isn’t the same as those days covering Edwards and McBride.

“It’s getting hard lately,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I just want the younger women to have it easier than we did.

“But I think back to my time here in Utah, and I had really good coaches and mentors and people who were kind to me, and so I think that’s important to continue to point that out.”

If she could talk to that version of herself just starting her career, Rowe would advise her to be herself more.

‘Trying to fit in’

“I think I spent a lot of my career just trying to fit in,” she said. “You’re the outlier in this kind of really famous boys club, and so I just wanted to fit in and be one of the guys. And so I wasn’t always my true feminine version of myself.”

She also wants young girls who are falling in love with football, like she did when she was 5 years old, to know that they’re welcome in the sport.

“I just want little girls to realize they belong here,” she said. “College football is a place for you. We have a stat. We have this seminar every year at ESPN. They kind of break it down like, who are the fans of college football? Who are we trying to reach?

“And right now in our country, there are more women college football fans than men, and so it’s just really important for us to make sure we’re including them and speaking to them and making sure that they feel comfortable here because college football is for everyone.”

Her ‘full circle’ BYU-Notre Dame connection

Rowe has worked multiple BYU-Notre Dame games throughout her career.

One of those games, she was working on graphics in ESPN’s TV truck. She exited the truck and saw people running and screaming. Rowe looked over at the source of commotion.

“It was Lou Holtz coming out of the Notre Dame locker room, and when I tell you it was like a crowd around a holy figure. … There were so many Notre Dame fans who came to that game,” she said. “I think that was the last time Notre Dame played out here.”

Saturday’s BYU-Notre Dame game also marks a first for Rowe.

“I think this is the first game of my career that I covered both head coaches when they were players,” she said.

Rowe still has her notes from covering Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman as a linebacker at Ohio State and “silly behind-the-scenes photos” with BYU head coach Kalani Sitake.

She interviewed Sitake, then a fullback at BYU, for a feature at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Laie, Hawaii, ahead of a BYU road game against the Rainbow Warriors. They later recreated the photos after Sitake became the head coach at BYU.

“I’ve been able to be at these games, a part of this series, and to be a part of this game with these two head coaches that I know so well and with both of these teams ranked and undefeated, it is just the coolest full circle,” she said.

Looking ahead at the next chapter in the BYU-Notre Dame series, Rowe thinks it will come down to the line of scrimmage.

She praised Notre Dame’s quarterback CJ Carr and offensive line, who “are just road grading people right now,” she said. But she noted the size of BYU’s defense.

“BYU is really big on defense,” she said. “Their linebackers are big. Their secondary is big. So I think this is going to be a really interesting line of scrimmage game because I think Notre Dame’s offensive line, how BYU can get to their quarterback, try to make it hard there, stop the running game, I think that’s going to be really an interesting part of this game.”

Rowe is also looking forward to seeing how BYU quarterback Bear Bachmeier has grown since she last saw him while she was on the sideline for BYU’s November loss to Texas Tech in Lubbock.

“I can’t wait to see how Bear has kind of grown up,” she said. “I think he’s playing very well right now. But against a really, really good Notre Dame defense, I’m really curious to see what’s different about him, how he’s reading the field, how he’s operating under duress, and so I can’t wait to see how that version of Bear has grown a little bit.”

BYU kicks off against Notre Dame on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. MDT on ABC.

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